IN LOS ANGELES at this moment, every Oscar-nominated actress is preparing for her appearance on the red carpet on Sunday. The nominees are camping in hotel suites, surrounded by so many racks of dresses and heaps of accessories that visitors could be forgiven for thinking they were backstage at a catwalk show.
By tomorrow, after slipping in and out of countless pairs of Swarovski-studded Jimmy Choos and innumerable sample dresses, they will arrive at a shortlist of two or three looks — but not until Sunday morning will they make their choice of what to wear to the ceremony. Usually the final decision is made with the help of the man they’re standing next to — that’s their hairstylist, not husband.
“What to wear to the Oscars? It is always, always decided at the very last minute,” says Serge Normant, the John Frieda stylist who coiffed Julia Roberts for four Academy Awards ceremonies.
Before Roberts received her Best Actress Oscar in 2001, Normant was on hand to help her to pluck a vintage Valentino ballgown from a rack that included dresses by Calvin Klein, Vera Wang, Michael Kors, Ralph Lauren and Giorgio Armani. In 1999, at Shutters on the Beach, an exclusive Santa Monica hotel, the Manhattan hairstylist Orlando Pita stood by Gwyneth Paltrow as she made her choice between a blue Michael Kors gown and the bubblegum-pink Ralph Lauren number she eventually wore to claim her Best Actress Oscar for Shakespeare in Love.
Before Halle Berry made her trip to the podium in 2002, she had assessed hundreds of dresses with the help of her stylist, Philip Bloch. Every weekend in the weeks leading up to the Oscars the pair would “do a new batch of dresses” until the night before the ceremony, when they decided on a hand-embroidered couture dress by Elie Saab.
It is impossible to predict what this year’s contenders will wear on the red carpet, but it is known that three of the nominees for Best Actress — Annette Bening, Hilary Swank and Kate Winslet — have been talking to designers who previously have dressed them for film premieres and award shows (Armani, John Galliano at Christian Dior and Ben de Lisi respectively). Cate Blanchett, up for Best Supporting Actress for The Aviator, may be considering something by her longstanding friend Alexander McQueen, while Natalie Portman, who played Alice in the film adaptation of Closer, will probably wear Zac Posen, whom she serves as muse.
Nominees cast their eye over many dresses, but they are also aware of the value of designers whom they know and trust. The red carpet at the Oscars is the world’s most scrutinised fashion runway and what a star most needs to work it faultlessly is a dress that will frame and enhance her beauty before the hundreds of prying zoom lenses.
Tricky batwing sleeves, trailing hanky-point hems, plunging necklines, weird colours — all these are trends broken by freewheeling teenage fashion models as they stalk the catwalks of New York, London, Milan and Paris. Today the Academy Awards is a huge part of the international fashion business, and one based on a harmonious and potentially highly profitable exchange between designers and Oscar-bound stars. A global audience of two billion people watches the ceremony every year, and designers who dress a contender or presenter do so because they hope for a return: the publicity is reckoned to be the equivalent of that generated by a million-dollar seasonal advertising campaign.
Meanwhile, whether she wins a golden statuette or not, every actress who hits the Oscars’ red carpet has the chance to hit the jackpot, because while striding along it she might catch the eye of an executive from L’Oréal, Revlon, Lancôme, Clairol or Chanel and become the next million-dollar face of a major cosmetics or haircare brand — an opportunity that gives her the freedom to pick and choose her future film projects. And so designers and celebrities deploy armies of staff to create the perfect Oscar-night look, and the preparations begin far in advance of the big night.
Philip Bloch claims that even the day after the Academy Awards he is already on the hunt for new designer labels and dresses for his celebrity clients. Meanwhile, Wanda McDaniel, the LA representative of Giorgio Armani’s fashion empire, spends the same amount of time in her office on Rodeo Drive heading an international team whose job it is to compile the sizes and fashion preferences of a long list of possible actor contenders for Armani to dress.
Moments after the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announced its shortlist of nominations in mid-January, gift baskets bearing exotic fruit, rare flowers and couture sketches were dispatched by the top fashion houses to the Best Actress contenders whom they hope to lure into their dresses. Out, too, went hand-delivered personal congratulation notes from Valentino and Galliano, swiftly followed by calls from their suave emissaries Carlos de Souza and Alexis Roche, to remind the chosen few that whatever their fashion dream, it could be whipped up easily in their European ateliers.
Today no nominee or high-profile presenter would think of slipping into a gown that a fashion model had already worn on any couture or ready-to-wear catwalk. “That dress is already dead,” says McDaniel. “Dead” in Hollywood parlance means that its photograph has been circulated worldwide, so it is no longer special.
For the past month Armani has kept in a vault at his Milan headquarters the best dresses from Privé, his couture collection that debuted last month in Paris. He is probably hoping that Annette Bening or Hilary Swank might wear one to the Academy Awards.
Though Swank is often dressed by Calvin Klein and considers Galliano’s Dior collection a personal favourite, she will most likely walk down the red carpet in Armani — Wanda McDaniel’s husband, Albert S. Ruddy, produced Million Dollar Baby, the film for which Swank received her Best Actress nomination. When it comes to dressing stars for the Oscars, personal relationships go a long way.
So, too, do a contender’s demands. The fashion favours that designers extend during the Oscar season are notorious — to reap press exposure they give nominees free clothes to wear at the lunches, award banquets, television shows and personal appearances that comprise their pre-Oscar campaigns. Every year during Oscar week, Angela Missoni books a suite at the Chateau Marmont, where her representative, Gerlinde Hobel, is on hand with samples from Missoni’s entire seasonal collection.
“It’s not just about making gowns for the red carpet,” says Missoni. “Dressing a celebrity for any event during Oscar week can be as important as making a dress for Oscar night — if you are lucky, you get it on the right person and then it’s photographed.”
Some designers reportedly have paid kickbacks of up to $50,000 (£25,000) to secure an actress’s promise that she will wear their dress to the ceremony. They often also provide the outfit of the date who accompanies an actress to the ceremony, be they husband, mother, father or sibling.
At one time it was not unusual to see a swath of nominees in similar dresses from Armani, Gucci or Valentino. Nowadays, if a star wears Gucci, she wants to be the only one in Gucci. Take last year’s Best Actress winner, Charlize Theron — as she politely explained to a representative of Tom Ford’s Gucci staff in Milan, if they wanted her working the scene at the 2004 Academy Awards in their bead-encrusted silk dress, they could forget about dressing anyone else — and they did.
Bronwyn Cosgrave is the author of Made For Each Other: Fashion and the Oscars, to be published by Bloomsbury early next year.
