Why Hollywood hated controversial Oscars ‘fashion show’

It sounds like the start of a bad joke: a live elephant wearing a costume from A Passage to India walks into a Los Angeles arts centre and hands the star of Flashdance an envelope. But this unlikely scenario actually did take place at the 1985 Oscars. In fact, scenes like these were by that point a regular sight at the annual event, as part of a now-defunct, mid-ceremony fashion show intended to honour the nominees in the Best Costume Design category.

While the sartorially minded elephant helped make the 1985 fashion show easily the most unhinged of these affairs in Oscar memory, it had some competition: there was the hairy performer in full Planet of the Apes garb leaping up from his seat to dance with Jane Fonda in 1969, regency men in Valmont regalia breakdancing their way across the catwalk in 1990, and Pierce Brosnan, Naomi Campbell and Claudia Schiffer introducing a Fashion Week-ready parade of Braveheart kilts, 12 Monkeys spacesuits and Sense and Sensibility gowns in 1996. Tyra Banks was one of the models that year, because of course.

This fashion fever dream will be forever famous on social media, where clips resurface every January or February as the Oscars approach (this year’s ceremony falls on 3 March). Viewers will routinely use the comments sections of Instagram and TikTok to beg for the Best Costume Design presentation to make its return — but the Academy never listens. Because, though this star-studded spectacle might be a crowd-pleaser, the catwalk brought with it its fair share of drama...

Associate producer Tessa Rayner, then 38, never wanted to go to the Oscars. She made TV adverts and music videos instead of films, and couldn’t be bothered to fight through LA traffic to get to the downtown Dorothy Chandler Pavilion theatre a few days before the 1996 ceremony. But when she was called for help by her good friend June Guterman, who’d been hired to associate produce that year’s Oscar fashion show, Rayner reluctantly volunteered her services. Arriving on the Warner Bros lot in Burbank, she found Tyson Beckford, Tyra Banks and 18 other models all gearing up to walk.

Rehearsals lasted two days and passed by breezily, with true pandemonium only arriving on the day of the ceremony itself. The costume design extravaganza, staged by the acclaimed photographer Matthew Rolston and executive produced by musician Quincy Jones, was set to open the 68th Academy Awards, but all of the show’s participating models had already been promised that they could walk the pre-show red carpet, too. That meant Rayner and her team had to get nearly two dozen supermodels out of their red-carpet looks and into their spacesuits and kilts in under 45 minutes. That many were late to the carpet — having got stuck in that damn LA traffic — didn’t help matters.

“I’m running in and out of the backstage area,” Rayner remembers. “Then Bryan Adams and Lyle Lovett said to this huge security guard, ‘She’s running out and dragging people in. We’re here standing in line. Do you know who (we are)?’ He just looked at them and was like, ‘She’s with Quincy’. That’s probably the most famous (I’ve been) in my entire life.” Rayner watched the catwalk kick off from the side of the stage, with Jones, Whoopi Goldberg and Mel Gibson nearby. “I had access to everything at the Oscars,” she smiles. “Probably more than Jack Nicholson.”

With missing models, speedy outfit changes, and an air of disapproval from the rest of the industry — the Best Costume Design show was always somewhat magnetised to drama from its inception. “In 1953, they started televising the Oscars,” explains Elizabeth Castaldo Lundén, author of Fashion on the Red Carpet: A History of the Oscars, Fashion and Globalisation.

Lydia Spencer-Elliott, The Independent