Amal Clooney — You're No Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis

Funny, but I posted Lee Radziwill's biting criticism of Amal Clooney the other night, "Lee Radziwill Disses George and Amal Clooney."

However, I didn't link to Ms. Radiziwill dissing Ms. Clooney's gloves, "Dear #AmalClooney, This is how opera gloves are worn."

And thus it's interesting to see this at today's New York Times, "The Uproar Over Amal Clooney’s White Gloves":

At the Golden Globes on Sunday night, the fastidious Amal Clooney made what passed for red carpet history, turning the proceedings at the Beverly Hilton hotel into something resembling an affair of state. For better or worse, depending on which critic one consults, she pulled off that dubious feat by accenting her dramatic one-shoulder Dior haute couture dress with a pair of pristine opera gloves.

Incandescently white against her regal black gown, and scrunched below her elbow, those gloves — her own — brought down on her head a storm of controversy. Kathy Griffin, in her Monday morning debut on “Fashion Police,” fired off one of the first salvos: “She had on those gloves that remind me of, like, a porn scene, where the guy goes home and there’s the naughty dishwasher, and she only has the gloves.”

Ms. Griffin was just one in a chorus of critics taking potshots at Ms. Clooney for a fashion choice that, however respectfully intended, struck some as uppity, or at the least, unsuitable. “They make this look like her prom, or her debutante ball,” sniped a blogger who signed herself only as Jessica on a celebrity site. “If Amal A. Clooney is anything,” she posted, “it is not a blushing teen or fresh young debutante.”

So hotly debated was Ms. Clooney’s fashion statement that it rated its own Twitter account, @msclooneygloves. Elsewhere, tweeters singled out the offending armwear as pompous or pretentious, charging that she appears to think of herself as royalty. Another joshed, perhaps accurately, “Amal wore the gloves to protect the engagement and wedding rings from prying eyes.”

White gloves are not a look to try lightly, The Telegraph of London cautioned: “Too glitzy and you risk comparisons with Michael Jackson; too starched and you look like the Queen.”

Was it a breach of fashion etiquette that raised such consternation? Not likely, as Ms. Clooney had committed no obvious faux pas, her gloves perfectly suited to her floor-length black gown.

Or was it simply that those gloves, which according to the mischievous George Clooney, his wife had stitched up at home that very morning, didn’t seem to fit? Though there is nothing in the 1961 style primer “Gloves: Fashion and Etiquette” to suggest it, common sense would seem to dictate that opera gloves be stretched taut, pulled in an unbroken line from fingertips to elbows.

If Ms. Clooney made a blunder, it was merely that she opted for an old-school flourish that invited unfavorable comparisons to flawless style-world denizens like Jacqueline Kennedy, Grace Kelly and Audrey Hepburn, the latter flaunting her gloves with perfect élan in films like “Sabrina” and “Breakfast at Tiffany’s.”...