Style Counsel
All eyes will be on Hollywood tomorrow night for the biggest night in the movie calendar – the Academy Awards.
And fashion fans will be eager to see what the stars choose to wear on the red carpet.
But could the choice of dress have any impact on whether you go home with a gong?
Statistics suggest that wearing a black Giorgio Armani or Valentino design could boost a nominee’s chances of winning an Oscar.
Fabric experts Dalston Mill Fabrics analysed every dress or outfit worn by each winner of a Best Actress and Best Supporting Actress Academy Award, to establish whether the colour and designer of a dress can affect the chances of taking home a coveted golden statuette.
Its findings suggest that black could increase the chances of winning an Oscar by almost a third, as 32% of Best Actress and Best Supporting Actress winners have dressed in black to accept their awards.
Noteworthy examples include Cher’s iconic sheer 1988 Bob Mackie gown and Frances McDormand’s 2021 black Valentino dress.
Designers Giorgio Armani and Valentino rank as the joint luckiest fashion houses to wear on the red carpet.
The 92nd Academy Awards was an especially lucky year to wear Georgio Armani, with both female winners in an acting category wearing Armani on the red carpet. Winner of Best Actress Renée Zellweger wore an Armani Privé white one-shouldered gown, while Laura Dern, winner of Best Supporting Actress, wore a pink Armani satin dress with a tasselled black upper.
The study revealed that 13% of female winners in recorded history wore a variation of the colour gold, making it the second luckiest colour to wear to the Academy Awards.
Recent success stories include Emma
Stone, who took home the Best Actress award for La La Land in 2017 dressed in a gold Givenchy Haute Couture design.
With 12% of winners wearing the colour, the third-luckiest to wear to the Academy Awards is white. Most notably, Audrey Hepburn famously referred to the gown she wore to collect her first Best Actress award in 1954 as her “lucky dress” – a white Givenchy gown adapted from her Roman Holiday costume.
The fourth luckiest colour to wear to the Oscars is blue, with 11% of all past winners wearing the colour, and green ranks fifth,
with 9%.