Kelly Osbourne Wore Vivienne Westwood to the NTAs, Days After Describing What Grief Did to Her

Kelly Osbourne walked the red carpet at the National Television Awards on Tuesday, September 8, in an off-the-shoulder blue plaid Vivienne Westwood gown.

She wore it with a handful of delicate gold necklaces, her blonde hair piled into a slicked-back updo, and a blue smoky eye. It is a confident piece of dressing, and the Westwood tartan is a considered choice for somebody whose public identity has always had a British punk inheritance running through it.

Jeff Spicer/Getty Images for The NTA's

Jeff Spicer/Getty Images for The NTA's

The evening itself

Osbourne, 41, attended with the Emmerdale actor Bradley Riches, whose series won Serial Drama on the night. His co-star Jeff Hordley won Serial Drama Performance.

Her account of it afterwards was uncomplicatedly happy. She had the best time, she wrote on Instagram, thanked the awards, called Riches the best date, and said how pleased she was that Emmerdale had won.

I couldn't see what other people saw because I was in so much pain. I just saw a broken person

What she had said two days earlier

The appearance carries more weight because of an interview published on Sunday, September 6, in which Osbourne spoke about losing a significant amount of weight while grieving her father.

Ozzy Osbourne died in July 2025 at the age of 76, after living with Parkinson's disease.

Her description of seeing herself was unsparing. She said she had looked frightening to herself, that she had not known she looked like that, and that her spine was visible bone by bone.

Then the line that explains why nobody around her could reach it. "I couldn't see what other people saw because I was in so much pain," she said. "I just saw a broken person."

That is a precise description of how grief works on perception. The body changes visibly and the person inside it is looking at something else entirely.

She also said she had tried to conceal her frame at the Grammys in February, where she attended with her mother Sharon and her brother Jack to watch the tribute performance for her father.

Why the two things belong in the same story

There is a version of this written as a before-and-after, and it would be the wrong one.

What actually happened is that a woman lost her father, stopped eating properly through a period she has described as unbearable, spent months hiding her body at public events including the one held in his memory, and has now talked about it in her own words.

The red carpet on Tuesday is not a reveal or a comeback. It is somebody attending an awards show with a friend two days after choosing to explain, publicly and without euphemism, what the previous year had done to her.

The dress is very good. The more notable thing is the sequence: she said it first, in her own terms, and then turned up.

The Westwood detail

It is worth noting the label, because Osbourne's choices have always been legible.

Vivienne Westwood built a house on tartan as a piece of British dissent rather than heritage, and it remains the most direct way to signal that lineage on a red carpet.

For a night out in London, at a television awards ceremony, with an Emmerdale actor as a date, it is close to a perfect piece of casting. Nothing about the evening was trying to be more than it was, which after the year she has described seems like the point.

The styling carries the same restraint. Delicate gold chains rather than a statement piece, hair pulled back off the face entirely, and the one deliberate flourish placed on the eyes. It is a look that declines to distract from the wearer, which is a harder thing to pull off than it sounds and an unusual choice for a carpet where most people are dressing to be photographed rather than to be seen.