Inside the controversial Oscars ‘fashion show’ – and why Hollywood hated it

For years the Best Costume Design Oscar was presented via an elaborate spectacle that involved supermodels, dancers and – on one occasion – a live elephant carrying an envelope with the winner’s name in their trunk. Lydia Spencer-Elliott digs into the archives to unearth the truth behind the show’s slow demise.

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. “It had to be a media spectacle so it was entertaining for those at home. So, in 1954 – the second year it happened – they introduced this ‘fashion show’, as NBC announced it. [It was] very controversial.”.

Major lay-offs had hit Hollywood in the Forties, and the decision to call the incredibly valuable work of costume designers “fashion” seemed to imply that their work was slightly needless – as if this was mere wardrobe that could be bought off the rack. “That’s disturbing to costume designers,” says Lundén. “They see their craft as something very different … Costume is not just about the garment. It’s about the actor who’s wearing it, and how it helps create a certain character; it’s a piece of fabric working in the context of a mise-en-scène of the whole film: the set, the colours. Fashion? You can wear [that] wherever you want.”.

The runway show took a leap from the theatrical to the surreal in 1969 with the introduction of song and dance to proceedings – primarily in a bid to capture a younger audience. That year, a man dressed as Fagin from Carol Reed’s Oliver! – which was nominated for 11 awards on the night – did a little jig to the audience. A couple frolicking in costumes from Franco Zeffirelli’s Romeo and Juliet then accepted the category’s award on behalf of the film’s costume designer – and not with a speech but with an interpretive dance performance.