Breaking This Unwritten Rule Of Oscars Style Will Have People Talking For All The Wrong Reasons – The List
The Academy Awards are the biggest night in Hollywood. Each year, the biggest stars in the world pile into the Dolby Theater, with the men in classic tuxedos and the ladies wearing elegant dresses they hope won’t land them on a list of fashion disasters. It’s an evening of glitz and glamour where everyone, even the seat fillers, has to look perfect. But doing so comes with some strict rules. Everyone wants to make a splash on the Oscars red carpet, but the exclusive event has some unofficial restrictions that everyone must abide by. One of the biggest involves wearing gold in a dress or suit. Simply put, only people who are nominated are allowed to show up ready to match the statues they could go home with.
As well as wearing gold, nominees are allowed to go bigger with their outfits while other attendees are expected to keep it slightly more low-key. Or, as stylist Tara Swennen put it in an interview with the New York Post, “Essentially, if you’re going because your husband was nominated for best director, you don’t need to have the biggest gown.” Fashion critic Tom Fitzgerald further elaborated, “If you’re showing up on Oscars night as a long shot wearing some gigantic attention-seeking piece of couture, there are people in the room — and people in the press — who are gonna be like, ‘Hmm, that’s a bit much.'”
Many other awards shows follow the Oscars’ lead when it comes to wardrobe rules. That is why, while there were plenty of questionable outfits at the 2025 Grammys, Bianca Censori’s nude look really caught everyone’s attention (in a bad way).
The Academy has shifted their fashion rules over time
In general, the Oscars’ wardrobe rules are not set in stone, and the Academy has notably shifted what is and isn’t appropriate to wear over the years too. In 1942, following the attack on Pearl Harbor and the United States officially entering World War II, the Academy Governors prohibited formal attire and toned down the celebration by turning it into a dinner and doing away with all of the usual pomp and circumstance outside the theater. 1953 was the first time the Oscars were shown on TV, and with it came a new rule from the Governors: Female attendees needed to wear dresses that didn’t show off any cleavage.
The 1960s saw a lot of big changes in fashion, and the glitzy event did what it could to keep the show from losing its glamour as celebrities chased the latest looks. In 1968, the Academy’s Costume Supervisor Edith Head sent out a memo to guests of the 40th Academy Awards, to handle the many questions “about the style of dress expected on stage.” Among other instructions, she requested that women “wear formal evening gowns either maxi or floor length, preferably pastel shades since the setting is very formal and done entirely in white and gold.”
Head also emphasized that “mini or day length” dresses were not appropriate for the evening at hand. The men, meanwhile, had fewer rules: “White tie with conventional formal evening accessories.” In 2021, a new memo detailing how to dress for the Oscars during the COVID-19 pandemic was made public. According to The Irish Star, celebrities were expected to dress in a fashion that was “inspirational and aspirational” adding, “In actual words, formal is totally cool if you want to go there, but casual is really not.”
