A pregnant nominee, a child star and a diehard eccentric… tonight’s Oscars fashion could be interesting. But, says Melissa Whitworth, woe betide the actress who dresses without professional help.
The timing could not have been worse: three days before the Oscars, the most important red carpet event of the year, John Galliano is arrested for allegedly making anti-Semitic remarks to a couple in a Paris café. Across Hollywood, actresses and stylists will be mentally throwing away their Christian Dior gowns – Galliano is head designer for the French fashion house.
It was rumoured that Natalie Portman, the star of Black Swan, the current face of Dior and the favourite to win the Best Actress Oscar, would be wearing a gown designed by Galliano tonight. The British designer may never be able to show his face in this predominantly Jewish town again.
How to deal with a couturier who’s facing charges for assault might be one of the more dramatic problems this Oscar weekend. But as stylists dress their A-list charges for tonight’s ceremony, there will be countless other crises going on behind the scenes. “It’s getting crazy here,” says Phillip Bloch, the celebrity stylist, on the phone from Hollywood. “It’s at fever pitch because no one’s made their decisions on what they’re wearing yet. And the designers are only just coming into town [after New York Fashion Week].”
All the big designers set up shop in Los Angeles for Oscars weekend. According to Bloch, who is dressing a presenter at tonight’s Oscars (he’s not allowed to say whom), the team from Calvin Klein has taken almost an entire floor at the Peninsula Beverly Hills.
“They woo and they coo – it’s really funny, because everyone at each design house has got an opinion. They’ll say, 'Oh this would look great on so-and-so’, but I know that actress would never in a million years wear that dress.”
If the red carpet is the modern-day casting couch, demanding the attention of directors and casting agents, then the Oscars, by far the biggest show of the awards “season”, is a maelstrom of gowns and baubles, pairing Hollywood egos with the biggest names in the fashion industry.
Last year, 41 million people watched the Oscars, and millions more pored over pictures of the actresses on the red carpet in magazines and on fashion and gossip websites around the world. What they didn’t see, however, was the back-stabbing, the high drama and backroom deals that go along with dressing the A-list.
Bloch remembers tragedies as well as triumphs. He put Halle Berry in the maroon Elie Saab dress the year she won Best Actress for Monster’s Ball, after viewing a rumoured 300 gowns. He also put Salma Hayek in a tiara the first year she attended the Oscars; afterwards, Mick Jagger called her, leaving a message saying how “hot” she looked.
But there have been disasters, too. One year Bloch dressed a heavily pregnant actress for the red carpet: after a fitting the night before the ceremony, the baby shifted position and they had to use pliers to cut through the wire mesh down the back of the actress’s Versace gown to get the dress past the bump. Another actress’s dress was so tight that she had to be lifted into the car and laid flat along the back seat.
So it’s no wonder that, at this time of year, stylists in Los Angeles seem more than a little crazy. “They are all so out of control,” says Bloch. “I was just over at Chopard and we were looking at jewellery. They are so full of themselves. You just think: 'You are not curing cancer or bringing about world peace.’ We are just making the world a prettier place one dress at time.”
This year the stylists will have their work cut out. Anne Hathaway, the youngest person ever to host the Academy Awards, will make a rumoured eight costume changes. Her stylist is Rachel Zoe, the undisputed queen of the red carpet, and, according to the Hollywood Reporter, her fee to dress Hathaway is “astronomical”.
Eight months pregnant, Zoe is not adverse to high drama. In 2009, with just hours to go before the Golden Globes began, the actress Eva Mendes stepped into a silk Dior strapless gown with a ruffled detail on the hip which had been selected after months of deliberation by Zoe’s team. Yet Mendes noticed a small stain on the silk and made a panicked call to Zoe’s team. Zoe, in full crisis mode, dispatched one of her team to inspect the stain. With hundreds of paparazzi lenses focused on each star as they walk down the carpet, an A-list actress can’t be seen in a dress with a stain.
There are stories about stylists holding on to dresses to prevent their rivals getting hold of gowns. Couriered garment bags mysteriously go missing. An insider says that Hilary Swank was allegedly paid handsomely to wear Calvin Klein when she was nominated for Best Actress in Million Dollar Baby, but at the last minute had a change of heart and wore a backless Guy Laroche.
Other potential pitfalls this year will be the challenge of dressing the pregnant Natalie Portman, not to mention Hailee Steinfeld, nominated for Best Supporting Actress, who is only 14 and under pressure to appear “age appropriate”.
Which is where the stylists step in. “There have always been stylists in Los Angeles, but the phenomenon really hit in the Nineties,” says Bronwyn Cosgrave, author of Made for Each Other: Fashion and the Academy Awards. “Designers and jewellers started 'gifting’ the celebrities in an effort to get them to wear their designs. Stylists came in and they became the filter between the two parties. But they had their own agenda: there were deals going on, and they started demanding the same perks as a celebrity would get.”
Another fashion insider says that deals are worked out with luxury brands and agents all the time. One actress is being paid six figures to wear a piece of jewellery on stage tonight, and most actresses have contracts in which they are paid to wear jewels. In the Nineties, actresses realised that being a spokesmodel for a brand, sitting in the front row of a show (for which celebrities often receive payment and free travel) or appearing in an ad campaign was an opportunity to make money.
In fashion parlance this is known as having a “relationship”. “Last season,” says the insider, “Carey Mulligan was a walking representative of Prada. I am sure they had a deal, which was honoured. Jodie Foster has been a friend of Mr Armani for 20 years; he has these 'relationships’ with people. Actresses understand their worth and they will exploit it.”
Cosgrave says she is seeing a new breed of fashion stylists who have spent years working behind the scenes on fashion magazines and have a more subdued demeanour. “I saw Kate Young backstage at the Jason Wu show, and she is styling Natalie Portman,” says Cosgrave. “What struck me is that she is so professional and has a personality that doesn’t upstage her clients. Young is introducing new designer names to the red carpet. We are seeing up-and-coming designers being worn who don’t have the money to shower celebrities with endorsements.”
The days of having fun on the red carpet – Cher in see-through gauze and sequins, Sharon Stone wearing a white Gap shirt, Angelina Jolie with a vial of her lover’s blood around her neck, or Björk laying an egg in a swan dress – are over. Dressing for the Oscars is no longer a laughing matter (except perhaps for Helena Bonham Carter).
“Someone like Tilda Swinton was the first to wear Lanvin, Jill Sander, Haider Ackermann [to Cannes] on the red carpet,” says Cosgrave. “These are new names and there’s a shift at the moment. But you will still see the established mega brands.”
Another example she gives of the new stylist is Elizabeth Saltzman, who will be dressing Gwyneth Paltrow tonight. Someone like Saltzman will “understand the mechanics of what’s involved in making a dress because she’s worked at Vogue and Vanity Fair. Actresses want things that are custom-made for them and it’s a painstaking process.”
Louise Roe will be reporting on the Oscars for the E! entertainment channel. “A red carpet 'moment’ can be a huge trigger for work, not just movie roles but advertising campaigns and endorsements,” she says. “If you make a big enough splash, the red carpet can catapult you to another tier of fame. Do a Liz Hurley with those Versace safety pins, and suddenly everybody wants to know your name.”
While most of us applaud Helena Bonham Carter’s approach to the red carpet – “I’m here because I’m supposed to be able to act well, not dress well,” she said after the Golden Globes last month – one rebel is not enough to change the entrenched relationship between the Hollywood and fashion industries.
According to Roe, most stars don’t have the time or the confidence to dress themselves. As a result, the stylist tends to become part of the actress’s inner circle. She adds: “It used to be more 'seen and not heard’, but now in LA you’d be almost as likely to know the name of somebody’s stylist as the actress herself.”
