THE WASHINGTON POST: Lily Allen’s new revenge dress is peak pettiness. We’re here for it

British singer Lily Allen kicked off a world tour this week in support of West End Girl, an album excavating pathos and pop from her split with the actor David Harbour. During 4Chan Stan, whose lyrics refer to pricey gifts bought for another woman, she wrapped herself in fabric printed to resemble the very receipts of which she sang.

To paraphrase Nicole Kidman’s AMC promo, “Somehow, being petty feels chic in a dress like this.”

There are sexier looks in the show, like the translucent Valentino slip dress she wears while singing Madeline. There are kinkier looks, like the leather bullet-bra maxi dress she wears during Beg For Me.

And the Jackie Kennedy-inspired pink pussy-bowed skirt suit she wears during the first song is arguably a more provocative nod to a woman in pain. (The tour was styled by Interview magazine’s editor-in-chief, Mel Ottenberg.)

But there’s something about those receipts.

We do love to see a woman in a “revenge dress,” don’t we? Looking fierce, fabulous and unbothered in public after being mistreated by a man.

Princess Diana ushered in the term “revenge dress” after she attended a fundraiser in a strapless Christina Stambolian gown, preemptively stealing the thunder of her husband hours before he was scheduled to confess his affair with Camilla Parker-Bowles in a televised interview. (The dress also inspired one of the worst showtunes in musical theatre history.)

Other notable revenge dresses include Elizabeth Hurley’s Valentino gown worn after Hugh Grant’s encounter with a sex worker named Divine Brown, Rihanna’s see-through Adam Selman dress, thought to be a kiss-off to Drake, and Bella Hadid’s Met Gala mesh catsuit designed by Alexander Wang following her breakup with The Weeknd.

“Every time a man cheats on you or treats you badly, you need a revenge dress. Every woman knows that,” Rihanna wrote in Vogue Paris in 2017.

Last year, Allen entered the pantheon of revenge dress goddesses when she showed up to the CFDA fashion awards in an underboob-forward Colleen Allen two-piece a week after “West End Girl” was released.

The dress Allen wore during “4Chan Stan” is not a revenge dress in this mould. It was designed by the tour’s co-creative director Anna Fleischle and made by her props team. It’s nine meters long, made of stretch lycra fabric and printed on both sides. As a garment, it’s not much. It’s hardly a dress at all. It’s more like a “revenge bolt of fabric”.

But that’s not the point. In a direct message, Fleischle said her creation was a “metaphor of a mind’s spinning in endless thoughts in a moment of betrayal and hurt.”

As the fabric wraps around Allen, it could be dressing a wound or forming a cocoon. “In that moment Lily takes it on and starts making her story her own again,” Fleischle wrote.

Her pain becomes her armour, freeing her to express indignation without fear.

Women are regularly condemned or punished for asserting themselves, for being too pushy or too shrill, for being vain. But if her man wronged her? She suddenly gets a bit of a pass.

It’s sort of like that line in Mean Girls where Lindsay Lohan’s character explains that Halloween is the only day of the year when girls can wear whatever they want without being judged. After a woman finds out she’s been lied to by a loved one, we expect her to be unruly. We celebrate it.

When we watch a video of a woman freaking out for unknown reasons, it’s a Karen video. When we watch Beyoncé smashing cars in Lemonade, it’s high art.

We sing along to rollicking pop songs about getting back at an unfaithful lover by destroying his property — Hit ’Em Up Style (Oops!), Before He Cheats, Bust Your Windows.

It doesn’t just have to be about romantic betrayal. When Heather Gay screamed, “Receipts! Proof! Timeline! Screenshots!” while unmasking a fellow Real Housewife of Salt Lake City as a secret gossip blogger pretending to be their friend, we could feel her rasp in our own throats, her indignation in our own hearts.

So, too, when we watch Allen dance across a stage, listing the ways a man did her wrong with proof — the receipts — wrapped around her.

The receipts dress isn’t pretty. It’s petty. Sometimes that’s enough.

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