Hello! 

I’m Vincent Boucher, fashion journalist and former celebrity stylist.

The Glossy is my take in the ramp-up to the Oscars on the nexus of fashion and entertainment, who’s making money now and how, and the most inventive looks in film and TV. We hope to come back and join you for Emmy season as well. Today is about Oscar nominee Kodi Smit-McPhee’s surprise stylist, Andrew Weitz’s advice on what to wear during our awkward return to office, and some choice words for the Academy from the Best Hairstyling and Makeup guild’s former longtime president, Sue Cabral, about the Oscars,

Please let me know what you think at mrvincentboucher@gmail.com.

1. Kodi Smit-McPhee’s Surprise Stylist

Hollywood is the land of reinvention but many are having a hard time wrapping their head around the notion that online entertainment media mogul Jared Eng of JustJared fame has emerged as the stylist du jour, masterminding an incredible run of statement “lewks” in the run-up to the Oscars for frontrunner, Kodi Smit-McPhee, nominated for Best Supporting Actor for The Power of the Dog,

Eng cheerfully returned my call on Friday as he was “schlepping garment bags” for Smit-McPhee, a favored nominee in both the BAFTA and Critics’ Choice awards tomorrow (Sunday). As has been told elsewhere, Eng’s foray into styling came when, through his friendships with young talent, he found himself giving fashion advice to young actress Joey King (The Act) for a red carpet appearance. She promptly hired him to do an upcoming press tour. Similarly, a friendship with McPhee led to his latest styling gig after an impromptu phone call a few years ago.

“I reached out to Kodi to have lunch and catch up. And he was like, ‘I'm going to ComicCon tomorrow,’ and I said, ‘What are you going to wear?’” The actor was planning just wear something from his own closet and Eng interceded: “You cannot go to like a press appearance dressed like a bum.”

Eng invited Smit-McPhee up to his house (“I have a great closet,” Eng notes) and though they are different heights and sizes (Smit-McPhee is 6’2”; Eng 5’10”), most of the clothes fit. After a marathon three-hour session, and photographing the looks, Smit-McPhee went off to ComicCon (where he was promoting X:Men: Dark Phoenix) in Eng’s own Raf Simons shirt and Thom Browne trousers. 

Cut to this year’s awards season and the young star, 25, has been a standout, in a sharp white Dior Men suit at the SAG Awards, a cloud-strewn Alexander McQueen silky grey number at the Oscar luncheon, and in custom Bottega Veneta leathers at the Critics’ Choice cocktail party (all chronicled, obviously, @jaredengstudios on Instagram). Eng says he wanted each choice to be distinctive but appropriately formal given the film’s level of recognition. “Kodi didn't want to dress too far out there,” says Eng. “But we haven’t done bow ties, though we’ve kept it to very clean lines and colors that aren’t too out there. Like his character, it’s very restrained.” 

Eng says at the start he got some pushback from designer teams questioning his professional commitment. “I also heard that some talent publicists and certain fashion PR people were on a text chain slamming my styling and saying, ‘Oh, Jared thinks he’s a stylist now?’ At first it hurt a little bit, but I know it was just their own insecurities and I kept my head down and continued doing the work.”

Eng says he wants to continue styling whenever someone is a good fit and he has recently started working with writer-director Cooper Raiff, who also stars alongside Dakota Johnson in Cha Cha Real Smooth, the winner of the 2022 Sundance Film Festival U.S. Dramatic Audience Award (and just sold to Apple TV+). He has no plans to cut back on his JustJared empire, which he runs with a staff of six editors.

“I've always loved fashion, but I never intended to be a stylist. But I never intended to be a blogger, just life’s circumstances happened,” says Eng, just 39 for a few more days. “It’s given me a new lease on life, in the way that when I started blogging, people were excited. I feel literally the same exact same thing with the styling.”

2. Best Makeup and Hair Styling: Then and Now

I was watching TCM’s Ben Mankiewicz the other night introduce a showing of 2011’s The Iron Lady as part of the network’s annual 31 Days of Oscar and, as he was tallying up star Meryl Streep’s Oscar stats (three won, 21 nominations), he mentioned that, on winning her Best Actress award for playing Margaret Thatcher at the 2012 Academy Awards, she first thanked her husband and then acknowledged, “the other man in my life,” her longtime makeup artist and hair stylist J. Roy Helland. She got a little misty eyed while explaining that they had started working together 37 years earlier on a play in New York and that their moviemaking relationship dated back to the making of 1982’s Sophie’s Choice. 

I looked up that 2012 broadcast afterwards because Helland also won for Best Makeup and Hair Styling that night. Streep gave him a playful catcall from her seat as he ascended the stage. Helland accepted his Oscar at the podium, deadpanning, “Thanks, Meryl, (cut to her smiling in the audience) for keeping me employed for the last 37 years.” Then he added, “Your brilliance makes my work look good, no matter what,” and looked out at her fondly in the front row. Then he reminisced about his childhood love of “double double features” and that getting to make movies was a dream come true. 

It was a wonderfully intimate, familial moment and a reminder of how intertwined the players are in every aspect of making a film. And it struck me as a stark contrast to the Academy’s plan this year to give out eight of the awards, includng Makeup and Hair Styling, in some kind of still-not-very-well explained presentation before the televised portion. 

This year’s Oscar producer Will Packer told The Hollywood Reporter this week that that segment will have its own host (“that’s all I can say about that”). But the last hour before the show starts is also when the big stars hit the red carpet for the ABC pre-show, so one wonders who exactly will be sitting in those front-row seats when the award is given for Best Makeup and Hair Styling this year. It probably won’t be House of Gucci’s Lady Gaga or Tammy Faye’s Jessica Chastain, whose movies are among the nominated films. Herewith, the noms:

• Coming 2 America: Mike Marino, Stacey Morris and Carla Farm

• Cruella: Nadia Stacey, Naomi Donne and Julia Vernon

• Dune: Donald Mowat, Love Larson and Eva von Bahr

• The Eyes of Tammy Faye: Linda Dowds, Stephanie Ingram and Justin Raleigh

• House of Gucci:  Göran Lundström, Anna Carin Lock and Frederic Aspiras

Like the Best Costume Design race that I reported on last week, the Oscar for Best Hairstyling and Makeup is too close to call, says former longtime president of the local guild Sue Cabral. At the organization’s own awards on Feb. 19, the top motion picture honors were split between Coming 2 America’s three awards for Best Contemporary Makeup, Best Special Makeup Effects, and Best Contemporary Hair Styling; Cruella for Best Period and/or Character Make-Up; and Being the Ricardos for Best Period Hair Styling and/or Character Hair Styling and its team, Teressa Hill, Yvonne De Patis-Kupka, Lindy Dunn and Kim Santantonio (not in Oscar contention). 

Likewise, the film honors at the 2022 Costume Designers Guild Awards Wednesday night were also split between Dune (Jacqueline West and Robert Morgan), Coming 2 America (Ruth E. Carter) and Cruella (Jenny Beavan), given their narrower categories of Excellence in Sci-Fi/Fantasy Film, Excellence in Contemporary Film and Excellence in Period Film. 

Obviously, the Oscars only gives single awards for makeup-hair styling and for costume design, so hazarding a guess is dicey at this point but I’ll be looking for signals as March 27th gets closer. But even the makeup union’s Cabral was a little unsure of how the presentations this year would go. “The Academy needs to do a better job of explaining. This is the worst PR and the Academy has done it to itself.”

3. Return-to-Work Outfit Anxiety  

Offices are beginning to announce their office re-openings, so I called fashion stylist Vanessa Shokrian to ask what she thinks people are going to be wearing as the pandemic (hopefully) recedes. “Everything is changing so much right now,” says Shokrian. “The pandemic, it's over but is it over? It feels like a weird transition time and people don’t really know what to get dressed up for. But they’re tired of sweatpants.”

Shokrian recently signed on as a style consultant with powerhouse men’s wardrobe maestro Andrew Weitz, who’s been dressing the likes of Ari Emanuel, Tom Brady and a Who’s Who of other Hollywood honchos for the last eight years, ever since he quit his job as an agent at WME in 2014 and hung out his own shingle with his eponymous company, The Weitz Effect. 

Now he’s branching out to include the distaff side with TWE Women and building out a team of women’s experts, like Vanessa, to work under his direction. His pitch is much the same as the one that landed with his male clientele: “When you walk into a room, you have a millisecond to make an impression,” purred his Instagram voiceover announcing the expansion, adding, “In today's world, it's just as important for women to present themselves as power figures. We empower elegance.”

But, as Vanessa was saying, the casualness born of COVID lingers. “From a female perspective, people are not turning that power suit thing back on,” she says. “Even what’s out there and what the designers are making feels more casual,” she says, citing the trend for, as she puts it, “high-scale leggings” as the successor to round-the-clock yoga pants (she likes brands Wardrobe.NY and Wolford). “They often have something like big zippers at the bottom and you can wear them with heels or shoes or boots. So, it's almost taking leggings and making them more dressed up.” 

Weitz is in a similarly casual frame of mind, bullish on the “shacket” or shirt jacket as the new blazer. He likes the ones from Loro Piana (see picture) and Isaia.

“I was working with this high-level CEO of a studio, and I said to him, ‘This is what you can wear to the office since you're just wearing jeans with a sweater or a button-up and a sneaker,’ Weitz says. “He hemmed and hawed and I go, ‘just put it on and trust me.’ He looked at it, and then he looked at me and he goes, ‘Yeah, you're right. This is pretty cool. ‘” 

Even if they’re just restocking casual pieces, someone’s buying clothes, with February in-store and online sales up nearly 10 percent over a year ago in a new Mastercard survey. Luxury purveyor Brunello Cucinelli, a Beverly Hills favorite, expects to double its sales by 2026 rather than 2028 as originally planned based on improved business. (The stratospheric prices can’t hurt: looking over the women’s new arrivals for spring, a lightweight sweater was featured at $3,195 and a linen blazer at $4,495, while on the men’s side, “leisure fit” cargo trousers and a knit polo will each set you back $1,195 and $1,095 respectively.)

Social gatherings seem to be the one place where there isn’t FODU (Fear Of Dressing UP), as Vanessa notes that women are starting to venture out to restaurants and smaller parties: “They've needed help putting things together but it's still definitely not a super, super dressed up vibe.” As for the upcoming Oscars, I asked Vanessa if she had any tips for the “civilians” or non-professionals attending. As it turns out, she is dressing the wife of a nominee. “She doesn’t want or need to be over the top, so I went to Albright Fashion Library in Beverly Hills where they do rentals, and we chose a beautiful vintage Oscar de la Renta strapless lace dress,” she says. “My client will wear it to the awards and to the after-party too and she’ll be comfortable. A lot of the vintage things are better than the stuff they are making now.”

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• CAMERA ROLL IS UP! Great photos of who was where this week in Hollywood.

• Zelensky Memo Reveals 'Your Business Smells Russian' Campaign: Sean Penn's co-director/producer shares the leader's call to action, revealed on The Ankler Hot Seat podcast.

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