If there’s one lesson to be learned from the 79th year of the Festival de Cannes, it’s that the age-old fashion rules do actually rule. Because it’s France, but more particularly because Cannes takes place in the South of France a couple of centuries on from Madame du Barry, Louis XV’s ultra-influential Maîtresse-en-titre, the king’s official mistress-in-chief whose dress, social moves and comportment carried such great weight at Versailles in her day, there have been a few wholly natural Darwinian diversions that have influenced the canon of festive dress as practiced in the 1770s. But just a few.

Fancy dress at events in France may occasionally seem somewhat outrageous, but actually the elements of style and the silhouette are quite stable — a highly crafted template for the bust and the waist, with an immense volume of fabric working from the waist down as a sort of plinth for the wearer. Pictured top, the always-adventurous Heidi Klum picks intuitively, but counterintuitively, the Azerbaijani design firm Sophie Couture for her May 21 amfAR gala gear, and they fearlessly limn this 18th century French style. With a couple of minor edits, that thing would have worked for Madame du Barry.

It will remain an irony of French fashion that the Late Sixties icon in Paris and at Cannes was the inimitable English singer and actor Jane Birkin, then in a long liason with France’s leading “bad boy” of music and film, Serge Gainsbourg. Birkin, pictured above with the bad boy himself on April 25, 1969, attends a Paris gala in the embroidered Emilio Pucci dress that she famously wore backwards because she hated the high neckline when she had it on the right way around. Birkin wanted that deep Pucci back slit up front and center, and she pinned it all together with a fat black brooch. Back in the day, Birkin caused a great clamor of honest approval with the frock, alongside a modicum of tepid ooh-la-la disapproval by the folks who actually approved of her daring but who were too cowardly to say so. In a word, c’est la France.

More to the point of Birkin’s enduring impact on French style, fifty-seven years on from that April in Paris, Birkin’s decision to reverse the Pucci caused Bella Hadid, pictured above headed into the May 20 screening of The Battle of DeGaulle: The Age of Iron, to engage Schiaparelli’s Daniel Roseberry to do a straight-up, forward-facing couture homage, with the trademark navel-deep Birkin décolleté actually purpose-cut into the front this time, complete with the trademark black brooch. The brooch is not an exact replica, but kudos to Roseberry and Hadid for finding, or making, one with three pendants, as Birkin had. According to the literature, the commission was a huge job for Schiaparelli’s embroiderers, who took a Sisyphean 22,000 hours to embroider the thing, give or take. We can only hope their eyes are all ok.

Caroline Scheufele, the artistic director and co-president of Chopard, splashed out as per custom and threw the amfAR gala on May 21 at the Hotel du Cap - Eden Roc in Cap d’Antibes. That meant, of course, that Byron, the King Charles spaniel, a well-known lapdog and occasional Chopard model/mascot/muse, would be in attendance alongside his mistress, the co-president. With them is Britain’s glamorous Marchioness of Bath, Emma Thynn, whose balletic pose and aerodynamic blue train lift the shot.

Pictured above, the Vieux-Port de Cannes, the “old port” marina, which, in addition to handling many smaller craft, has 58 designated superyacht berths that can handle boats up to 140 meters (459’ 4”) during the 78th Film Festival last May.

Holding to the Madame du Barry gown form, peripatetic Russian expat-still-mysteriously-surviving-on-the-Med Victoria Bonya, a former reality show presenter in Russia and modest fashion entrepreneur, brings a whiff of the Bond franchise’s legendary femmes fatale what with that black cane accessorizing the heck out of that frilly hot pink number. Perhaps this is even one of those not-so-secret red-carpet style-auditions that so plague film awards? Mysterious Russian expats of no specific address find themselves often in chronic need of funds.

Now that the newly buff and freshly married Jeff Bezos, among others, will have the final say on casting the next Bond, the Amazon/MGM team currently sweating the fact that there has been no Bond release in the last half-decade would be well advised to study their forebears’ work. Casting for the next installment is, apparently, underway, but as usual with all Bonds, the producers are now in the tight-lipped mode about that.

To wit: There is no Bond film possible, unless Bond is given 1) a giant wasp nest of villians, and 2) a bevy of beach-ready femmes fatale to work through. It never really matters what any of these characters might aspire to or what their narrative actually is, as long as the first group try to kill as many people as possible (in addition to Bond) along the way toward realizing their dastardly project. Secondarily, but no less important as a narrative linchpin in any Bond installment, the femmes fatale group’s job is to form, serially or en masse, a sudden, cartoonish-yet-somewhat-believable emotional attachment to Bond, very much including bedding the bloke, while also possibly trying to kill him, depending on what “political” curlicue the writers have laid into this or that femme fatale character’s backstory. Sometimes she’s latter-day KGB/FSB; sometimes she’s something else, but they’re called femmes fatale for a real and deadly reason. All Bond writers and producers like to emphasize that they take the adjective in the cliche literally, so it’s the best sort of narrative fuel for the vehicle if one or a couple of the ladies kill somebody, or try to kill Bond, early in the going. In a Bond, if Bond and a lady meet that way, that’s the cinematic narrative equivalent of “meeting cute” in a romantic comedy.

Hopefully, Lauren Sanchez Bezos will be involved in casting the next installment. Her own profile and highly agile habits, such as dropping up into “space” with some of her buddies in a Blue Origin spacecraft, hew closely to a Bond femme fatale.

Memo to Mr. Bezos and to Mrs. Bezos: If you wind up having Victoria Bonya come in for an audition, please remember to ask her to bring the cane! Given the expertise of your very best prop people over at Amazon/MGM, this little white-tipped party-cane of Bonya’s can definitely be fitted with very fine latter-day ricin-capsule shooter like the one built into the infamous umbrella-gun that the KGB used in London to shoot and kill BBC writer and exiled Bulgarian-dissident Georgi Markov in 1978! Kismet! At the amfAR Gala, Ms. Bonya looks every inch ready to be that sort of plot catalyst for you.

Speaking of budding directors, did we mention that John Travolta, pictured above left with his daughter Ella Bleu at the “Karma” screening on May 15, very much wants to change his position on the set to behind the camera? Reportedly, this is his styling logic behind the beret, since he’s noted that, in historical photographs, quite a number of seriously old-school Hollywood directors wore berets. With all due respect for that, we can’t find much evidence of Howard Hawks, John Ford, Michael Curtiz, or Billy Wilder in berets. In support of Travolta’s argument, it should be noted, Charlie Chaplin, an Englishman, did in fact wear a beret as an actor spoofing a pretentious director in his 1916 short Behind the Screen. And of course Groucho wore one here and there, spoofing it in his rich, lightning-fast schtick as well.

But let’s not beat around the bush on this red carpet. It’s obvious that the accomplished actor could not be deterred from his disastrous choice of topper. Fine, we’re over that. Problem is, white. Yes, Travolta — or his stylist if there was one — may have been trying to match the tie or the pocket square, or both, but why a white beret? Asked another way, why a white beret in France?

We’re not exactly sure what this white beret announces, but whatever it is, it’s unfortunate, and given this thing’s quirky wearer, the lid is traveling off on a tangent way out there beside the point, like that lone Neptune moon that travels in a reverse orbit to the others. The beret is AWOL from the mission that Travolta so wants it to be on, thus it does nothing but confuse. If a man is not French but still feels compelled to wear a beret in France — an ill-advised notion at best — we’re sure that a time-honored, regulation black French beret would have matched the suit, set off the face better, and might have (sort of) disappeared.

We’re also sure that Cecil B. DeMille — to recall a clean-shaven, beret-free director of the old school who showed up before his casts of thousands in his regular business trousers and brogues with his plain, strong, bald head carrying godlike directorial authority — would not have condoned Travolta’s sockless-boulevardier loafer look for this red carpet, either. Get some socks, man! Even the current day’s premier sockless-boulevardier and Notting Hill rake, Jude Law, wears socks when in formal wear.

Cape-jacket with giant sorceress sleeves, multiple rings very much outside the black see-through gloves, and a breastplate that seems like it would turn a broadsword forms the winning armor for Sharon Stone, pictured above arriving at the screening of Fjord, the eventual Palme d’Or winner.

In contrast to Travolta, the confident Henry Samuel, whose mother is Heidi Klum and whose father is the British singer Seal (aka, Henry Olusegun Olumide Adeola Samuel), does not require socks with his slip-ons at the amfAR gala on May 21, nor even a shirt. The simple answer to the seeming contradiction is, yes, for better and for worse, youth. Mr. Samuel is all of 20 years old at the moment, growing like a reed, not much time on the planet yet, but his fitness is clear. The embroidered suit jacket’s long line also works, but at bottom, this kit, and the lack of it, passes muster because it’s carried by the bright, insouciant energy of youth. It’s why there is such a bristly series of edicts around the idea of age-appropriate dressing.

Air kissing is an underrated sport in the best of times, but when the pressure’s on — which is to say, when a thousand cameras are focused on those who meet and greet — it can get difficult. En route into the Hotel du Cap Eden Roc for the amfAR Gala on May 21, from left, Eva Longoria, British singer Robbie Williams and his wife Ayda Field Williams attempt the “two-versus-one-we’ll-all-take-turns” variation, which looks like it’s working only somewhat well. Williams is listing too quickly and too far out to his right to make it a passable move for the cameras, and it’s discombobulating Longoria, who’s expecting the embrace. It’s an unfortunate shape Willaims throws.

Charitably, Williams seems distracted and may even be committing that second, larger red-carpet/party sin at the moment of greeting, which is to crane a look over Longoria’s shoulder at someone else, his posture implying that that second, off-camera person may be worthier of his attention. Than Longoria. Conservatively, the well-known pop singer has been photographed something like fifty billion times, but perhaps he needs a quick air-kiss-akido refresher on how to remain in the moment from his trainers responsible for choreographing his close body work at charity ball entrances. It’s a deceptively athletic discipline, the air kiss.