Now, that is one short dress. (It's Balmain, by the way.) It's absolutely gorgeous, but it is shorty-short-short. On one hand — would you look at those stems and tell me that if you had them you wouldn't parade around with them exposed every dingdong chance you got? It would be hard not to. I do not have an issue with the fashionable-ness of the dress or of the "questionable" appropriateness of a woman of Ms. Paltrow's "advanced age" wearing it. (You can practically hear me rolling my eyes, right? But it's true — I read dozens of comments on celebrity blogs scolding her for being too old to wear such dresses. I'm all for age-appropriate dressing, I think we know, but Ms. Paltrow? Is a methuselan 35. It's not like Judi Dench strapped herself into a Rudi Gernreich, for pete's sake.) My quibble is this: How on earth does she sit down in that thing without making a spectacle of herself??? She is going to a movie premiere after all, and at some point I think there is a reasonable expectation that she will sit down to view said movie. Does a personal assistant magically appear at that moment to throw a lovely Hermes shawl over her lap? Do they synchronize the dimming of the lights in the theater with Ms. Paltrow's approach to her seat? Not to mention (and I've said this before) the Ick Factor. Put me in a dress that short (and really, you should not) and you'd find me at said movie theater several hours in advance, steam-cleaning my assigned seat to my own specifications. Not to mention climbing into whatever chauffeured vehicle was conveying me to the event with a bottle of Lysol and a sponge.

But maybe that's just me....