SIX-PAGE OSCAR PREVIEW
How fashion choices on Oscar night can shape the careers of Hollywood actresses
Within seconds of the red-carpet Oscar coverage beginning, the world’s media will be reduced to a scrapbook of fashion images and photo galleries, a seething mass of virtual judgments — more often about women than men — ranging all the way from “she killed it” to “what the hell was she thinking?”
No wonder Hollywood is throbbing with nervous energy. The jewels, shoes and clutches may already be laid out in Beverly Hills Hotel penthouses, ripe for the picking, but last week, a procession of slick messenger vans with more security than a presidential motorcade, has been delivering The Dresses, fresh from their ateliers in Europe, to top stylists across Los Angeles.
That’s when Cate, Sandra, Judi, Meryl et al. will get the call: “It’s here. We need you to come in for a fitting.”
The stakes are high enough for A-listers and can be life-changing for industry ingenues. “Young girls can get famous today without having huge roles in blockbusters, just by having style,” Leslie Fremar — stylist for Julianne Moore, Charlize Theron, Reese Witherspoon and Scarlett Johansson — told the March issue of Vanity Fair.
The right dress, jewels, hair and makeup may not only win an actress the endorsement of a major fashion house, she says, but also “bring awareness to decision-makers who maybe didn’t think she was beautiful, sexy, or desirable enough to open a movie. This is now an integral part of the Hollywood business.”
Just how integral is becoming cause for concern. When Jennifer Lawrence showed off her new pixie cut on the red carpet at the première of The Hunger Games: Catching Fire last November, CNN issued a breaking-news alert.
“That was the weirdest thing that has ever happened to me in my entire f — ing life,” she later told talk-show host Jon Stewart. “Terrorists in the Middle East know I got my hair cut.”
Terrorists also will know that actresses Hayden Panettiere and Edie Falco bought their Golden Globe dresses “off the rack.” Tsk, tsk.
“It’s the first time I’ve ever worn Tom Ford,” Panettiere gleefully admitted, “because I’ve been begging.”
This confounded fashion journalists and the designer himself, who assured anyone who asked that “he only dressed Naomi Watts” that night.
“Good for Hayden,” says one A-list blond actress who, tellingly, didn’t want to be named. “I’m so sick of clippity-clopping down red carpets. We’re not show ponies.” Only, of course, they are — otherwise they would be speaking on the record and en masse. But signs of dissent in the ranks are starting to bubble up.
At last year’s Academy Awards, against her harem of stylists’ advice, Anne Hathaway decided at the last minute to ditch the Valentino dress she was going to wear (she believed it was too similar in colour and cut to Amanda Seyfried’s, her co-star in Les Miserables) and sported a pink Prada column gown instead.
And at the Screen Actors Guild Awards last month, Cate Blanchett told off one cameraman for scanning her Givenchy gown from bottom to top, snapping: “Do you do this to the guys?”
Meanwhile, Mad Men actress Elizabeth Moss gave the finger to E! Entertainment’s “ManiCam” at the Golden Globes — letting her middle finger do the talking for all the “show ponies” who had been demeaned into giving the TV station a close-up of their manicures over the years.
These are just a few uprisings in a red-carpet game that most still understand the need to play. Because unlike us, these actresses have been privy to the behind-the-scenes power-broking that has gone on for months in the buildup to Oscar night. Blanchett may find her close-ups sexist and debasing but lesser, more cynical members of her profession will have the figures they will receive for every camera zoom, firmly in mind.
When a star will be paid an estimated $125,000 for wearing earrings, $75,000 for a necklace, $50,000 for a bracelet and up to $25,000 for a ring, it’s no wonder these girls are drenched in diamonds. They’re endorsing not just the brand, but the stylist ingenious enough to put the jewels, dress, shoes and clutch together. They’re also being endorsed by the brands (“If Naomi Watts can get Tom Ford she must be double-A list”) in what has become the perfect symbiotic relationship.
“The problem,” says British designer Caroline Castigliano, who has dressed the likes of Helen Mirren for the red carpet and enjoys a more personal relationship with her clients, “is that because designers are paying a lot of money to get their products on a lot of important people and because it’s become more about big business than esthetics, you often end up with the wrong dresses on the wrong people. And these actresses are just insecure enough to think that they’ve got to play ball.
“So a lot of them look incredibly uncomfortable with what they’re wearing on the night. Can you imagine someone like Elizabeth Taylor, back in her heyday, being told what to wear?”
Ingrid Bergman certainly played by her own rules, wearing a pair of printed Chanel silk pyjamas from her own closet one year and the same dress twice. Stylists may have begun their rise to near godly status in the 1970s, but even well into the 1990s actresses were still plucky enough to call their own shots when it came to choosing what to wear to the most important event of the year. When Jodie Foster and Annette Bening both decided to wear almost identical beaded Armani gowns to the Oscars in 1992, they agreed beforehand in the designer’s salon: “I don’t care if you don’t care.”
Six years later, Sharon Stone paired a lilac Vera Wang evening skirt with a Gap shirt from her then-husband’s closet.
“The people who look like they are wearing their own clothes and jewels make the best Oscar moments,” confirms fashion arbiter Andre Leon Talley. “That’s rare now — it’s an industry, a system. They are all afraid not to follow the herd.”
At the British BAFTA Awards, Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt arrived in similar tuxedo get-ups. So, come Oscar night, can we not look forward to a little red-carpet dissidence?
Castigliano thinks this is unlikely. “We are seeing a rising up against being ‘show ponied’ but do you think anyone is really going to be the one effectively to say ‘I’m not doing this any more?’ I don’t. I suspect the vast majority are happier being sheep.”