Last night’s VMAs were, in a word, eventful. Miley Cyrus talked about smoking weed (quite a bit). Nicki Minaj called her out for some not very nice comments. Taylor Swift hugged people. Kanye announced that he’s running for president in 2020. With all that stuff going on, it’s no wonder that a lot of people missed out on another important thing that happened at this year’s awards show: Amber Rose’s red carpet outfit.
While most celebs went for the standard sparkle plus side boob thing, Amber and friend Blac Chyna decided to use their red carpet outfits to make an important point about the words used to shame women.
Amber Rose and Blac Chyna wore, respectively, a jumpsuit and dress, each covered in derogatory words often slung in the general direction of women in the public eye, including ‘gold-digger’, ‘slut’, ‘whore’, and ‘bitch’. In a red carpet interview, Amber commented that these are just some of the insults she’s heard many times before.
Take a look through her Instagram, and you’ll see that Amber’s pretty much getting called a slut, bitch, and other sexist insults on a daily basis. Mostly because she’s single, the ex-girlfriend of Wiz Khalifa and Kanye West (hey, remember when he was gross and said he had to take 300 showers after being with her?), and posts a lot of selfies.
By wearing the words people keep using to try and hurt her across her body, Amber powerfully reclaimed them. Here’s an outfit that says ‘yep, I’m aware of what people are going to call me, I accept it, and I don’t really care.’
Amber’s friends’ outfits went along a similar theme, covered in the word ‘faggot’.
She followed up her appearance with a shout-out to the slut walk she’s got planned for October, just to hammer home the whole empowering women to overcome the bullsh*t labels, thing.
There's definitely an important lesson we can learn from Amber and Blac Chyna: one about refusing to stay silent, calling out the people who try to shame us, reclaiming the words they use to define us, and taking away their power
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This article originally appeared on The Debrief.