The Twilight premiere was my first experience with a stylist. Actually, he was more a friend of a friend who told me he could convince some less-reputable showrooms that he was a stylist, but he was willing to work for free, so the job was his! He got me three dresses: the pink one was too small, the silver one made me look like the world’s saddest sex robot, and the black one . . . sort of fit. We decided on the black one.
After the premiere, a costume designer friend told me he’d seen a picture of me in a magazine. “You looked cute, you were wearing this kind of kooky black dress.” Kooky? “Yeah, it had a ruffle around the collar and a kind of kooky bell sleeve.” It had a ruffle around the collar? It had sleeves? All I had noticed was that it was a black dress. And it fit me. And it didn’t make me look like C-3PO’s slave wife. I had thought of it as the “safe” option, as a “little black dress.” Turns out someone who knew stuff about clothes immediately identified it as “eccentric.” Lucky for me, he seemed charmed by it. I’d gotten away with “taking a risk” on my first real red carpet. Also, I was the thirty-seventh-most-important character in the Twilight movies, so no one gave a shit anyway.
When Up in the Air was chosen to premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival, Paramount Pictures hired a professional stylist for me. I suspect word had gotten back to them that I enjoyed dressing like a teenager who lived in her car, and while that was spectacularly endearing, it would be in their best interest to have someone help me dress like an adult woman. I wanted to do whatever I was supposed to do to promote a movie of that caliber, and I was excited about the prospect of playing dress-up in free clothes instead of begrudgingly spending money I needed for Panda Express at Bebe whenever I got invited to something.
Since the movie wasn’t out yet, and to fashion people indie films don’t “count,” my stylist was effectively working with someone who had no credits. To be honest, I don’t understand how styling works to this day and I’ve given up trying to figure it out. I think part of the ambiguity comes from the stylist wanting to protect you from the harsh realities of the fashion world. If I mention in an email that I think some designer makes especially beautiful dresses, and my stylist never gets back to me about it, I can assume she didn’t want to say, “No, honey, that designer is a huge deal and you’ve been in one movie that hasn’t come out yet.” So you both pretend the email never happened.
The first time I went to my stylist’s house and pawed through a rack of dresses, it felt like Christmas. When I tried them all on, it felt more like Christmas without presents, food, or alcohol. Her distinctly unfamous client was not a big selling point for designers to give up their best stuff. You can only try on so many olive-green paisley numbers before you seriously consider creating a dress from toilet paper and bedsheets. But buried in this mountain of lamé and brocade, there was one gorgeous soft-pink Marchesa. I still don’t know how she got it. I don’t know if the dress was lined with asbestos, or if they owed her a favor, or if she stole it out of a pile reserved for Anne Hathaway. I had no credits but we got a Marchesa. And the fucker fit. (Also, I learned that things which I thought fit didn’t fit. “Fit” to me now means: it looks more like a piece of clothing than a garbage bag, and it can be made to “fit” with extensive tailoring.)
We decided to go with the pink dress, and after we got it tailored and found a bra that didn’t show, my stylist asked me about shoes. She thought it was important that I wear a pair of expensive shoes—not just dressy-looking shoes, actual expensive shoes. It turned out magazines were going to decide how seriously to take me based on whether I wore designer shoes or shoes that looked nice but didn’t cost enough to feed a family for a month, like some kind of phony. She came to my apartment with three pairs of shoes in a shopping bag and said we should pick one pair and she’d return the rest.
“The Louboutins are a little pricier than the others, but it’s your first big premiere, and I think they’re really special.”
“Okay, how much are those?”
“One thousand ninety-nine.”