Here are some photos of Lily James and Richard Madden at last night’s Cinderella premiere in London. Lily’s Balenciaga gown is pretty, but… that button or whatever we’re calling it? It’s pretty epic. It looks like something the button-loving Duchess Kate would imagine during a fever dream. “I want half of my dress to just be one huge BUTTON!!!” Still, it is pretty. I like that the pale blue references the famous Cinderella gown.

As many people keep saying, Lily James is a small, slender girl. She’s naturally like that, I don’t think anyone doubts that. But many people have taken issue with the fact that Disney put Lily into a really, aggressively cinched corset for Cinderella. When people questioned the miniscule, corseted waist of Cinderella, Lily took it personally. Like, she was offended. Offended that people were like “Um, this film is aimed at very young girls and it promotes a really unrealistic body image.” Many of you said – and I agree – that this isn’t Lily’s fight and that she should just refer these questions to Disney. But while she was promoting the film in London, she got asked more questions about her waist and once again, she doesn’t “get” it.

Speaking at a press conference today at London’s Claridges Hotel, Lily James said about the waist controversy: “Why on earth are we focusing on something so irrelevant? I’ve had friends’ kids and a little boy called Daniel, whose nine, who said ‘it’s amazing how you promised your mum to be kind and good and you remembered it’ that’s the message.”

The film’s costume designer, Sandy Powell, then added, according to PA: “I don’t understand what the concerns are actually. Lily does have a small waist, but then so do all the other girls in the film, all the girls in the film wear corsets because that’s what you wear with period clothes – it creates the silhouettes. Lily’s dress in particular is an optical illusion, I have to say. The diameter of the skirt is about two metres and it has the width and that really does make the waist smaller than it actually is.”

[From Express]

If you read the full Express article, it sounds like Sandy Powell and a female producer jumped into the conversation really quickly, which leads me to believe that somewhere at Disney, they realize that Lily is somewhat incapable of answering these questions on her own. She takes it way too personally. And no, this conversation is not “irrelevant.” Moms want to take their daughters to a movie where the heroine doesn’t look like she has damaged her internal organs with a too-tight corset.

Photos courtesy of WENN.