Parenting & Family Quote by Steven Cojocaru

Cojocaru is doing what fashion critics do best: turning a red-carpet look into a referendum on taste. His praise of Nicole Kidman hinges on a mantra that sounds easy until you try to pull it off: "less is more". The repetition of "very, very" and "so" signals enthusiasm, but it also reveals the tightrope he is admiring. Simplicity, in this world, is never neutral. It is a performance of restraint, a kind of luxury that reads as effortless only because the wearer has the status (and stylists, and lighting, and bone structure) to make understatement look intentional rather than underdone.

The key tension is in the split-screen reception: "washed out" versus "so chic". That contrast exposes how quickly audiences punish minimalism, especially on women, when it doesn’t announce itself loudly enough. "Washed out" is the classic dismissal of a palette that refuses to cater to spectacle; it frames subtlety as failure. Cojocaru pushes back, positioning himself as the arbiter who can detect the difference between bland and edited, between fading into the background and choosing the background on purpose.

There’s subtext, too, about the era’s red-carpet arms race, when "fashionable" often meant maximal: sparkle, saturation, statement. By applauding Kidman’s simplicity, he’s staking out a contrarian sophistication. He’s not just defending a dress; he’s defending a way of looking. In that sense, the quote is criticism as identity: taste isn’t what you like, it’s what you can justify against the crowd.