FASHION DISASTER

For years the Best Costume Design award at the Oscars was presented via an elaborate show – on one occasion involving an elephant. Lydia Spencer-Elliott unearths the truth behind the display’s slow demise and why it was hated by Hollywood

- Lydia Spencer-Elliott

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...