By Adam Bloodworth
The Oscars earlier this week were a confection of elements: sure, they’re a nod to the year’s cinematographic output, but really, isn’t it all about looking at what the guests were wearing?
Voyeurs tend to focus on the female stars, from Grace Kelly’s immaculate Edith Head gown in 1955 to Björk’s quirky swan dress in 2001. It is rare for the gentlemen to get a look-in, with exceptions like Pharrell Williams opting for shorts with a dinner jacket in 2014 (absurd, but it made the headlines) and Billy Porter five years later pairing his black tie with a full length gown. A man getting noticed must be “brave”.
The flipside of this should be that the Oscars are an easy win for the spear side. All you need is black tie—a tuxedo, if you must—and, as I’ve written many times before, it’s very easy to look good in that uniform if you follow some basic rules. As we can assume that guests at the Academy Awards are not working within the tight confines of a budget, it should be simple indeed. You could select your outfit in five minutes.
Yet it seems not to be that easy. One of the viral episodes of this week’s ceremony was a rather churlish and uncooperative Hugh Grant failing to make an interview easy for Ashley Graham of ABC. There was a delicious moment when Grant compared the hoopla of the Oscars to Vanity Fair, Thackeray’s hefty deconstruction of Regency society, while Graham (for whom I had some sympathy) understood him to mean the elegant magazine which sponsors the famous after-party. But mostly I was transfixed, in horror, I hasten to add, at the stark, snowy-white expanse of Grant’s shirt.
Hugh Grant is the epitome of the English gentleman. He has made a career cultivating that image, from the first steps of Maurice and White Mischief through his jump to lightspeed in Four Weddings and a Funeral and onwards. When asked by Graham what he was wearing, he muttered “My suit”, and on further inquiry attributed it to “My tailor”. Charmless but accurate, one might think. And as dinner jackets go, it seemed unobjectionable, though I think he hit a high note early on when he was accompanied to the premiere of Four Weddings by Elizabeth Hurley in That Dress: his ensemble went unreported but was a classic mid-90s double-breasted dinner jacket and authentically untidy bow tie.
On the red carpet, however, as he wrestled his inner awkwardness, he put his hand on his hip at one point. Adequate though his dinner jacket may have been, it was being worn without any sartorial safety net: no cummerbund, no waistcoat. So instead he revealed the textured bib of his dress shirt (and its limits) and what seemed like acres, though he is a slender man, of white fabric. It looked dreadful. It is the eveningwear equivalent of Bagehot’s “letting in daylight upon magic”.
The trouble began, for the Oscars, in the late 1960s. After a period of wartime economy, the ceremony reverted to its original dress code of white tie in 1949. These were the glory years of Hollywood glamour: Ronald Colman, Bob Hope, Bing Crosby and above all David Niven, the most debonair of all. The code was straightforward, it was easily adhered to, and there are very few men who do not look at least better than they did in proper white tie and tails.
It died in the haze of the 60s, of course. 1968, in the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium as in so many other parts of America, was a messy year. Black tie jostled with white tie while there were intrusions from I-don’t-know-what. The Academy admitted defeat and decreed that for the following year the dress code would be black tie. It was a shocking example of appeasement in the face of aggression.
Everything in Hollywood now seems to be a reboot. So why not extend that to the Oscars? Rediscover the roots of the Academy Awards, let the men reach a little higher for sartorial glory, and bring back a dress code which politely but firmly requests white tie. Conceal it in a Gilded Age theme or some anniversary. Make the old new, the past your future. Make America Glamorous Again.
Eliot Wilson, co-founder of Pivot Point Group
The post Let’s insist male guests at the Oscars wear white tie appeared first on CityAM.
