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By the time Cher was nominated for an Academy Award for best actress for her work in 1987’s Moonstruck she had already shocked the Oscar crowd with a wonderfully insane outfit. At the 1986 Oscars Cher did the most Cher thing you could possibly imagine. She showed up in a towering feathered headdress, midriff bare, both the top and bottom accentuated by triangular hems, like teeth chomping on her stomach. The showgirl-inspired outfit was created by her longtime collaborator, the designer Bob Mackie, who would later tell the New Yorker that it was conceived at least a little bit out of vengeance. That season, Cher had starred in Peter Bogdanovich’s film Mask, playing the mother of a disfigured teenager. She had won best actress at Cannes but was snubbed at the Oscars. “She was pissed off, because she didn’t get nominated for ‘Mask,’” Mackie said. “There were a lot of people who said, ‘That’s not fashion!’ And I said, ‘Of course it’s not fashion. It’s a crazy getup for attention.’ And it did get attention—people talk about it still.” Mackie would recall to me in a phone call that they met about the design at her then-boyfriend Tom Cruise’s New York apartment. “She said, ‘I don’t want to look like a housewife in an evening gown,’” he remembers. “We never have to worry about that.”
By the time Cher did get nominated two years later, she had a big act to follow in the fashion department: her own. Cher is one of those performers who seems to be constantly in the midst of a renaissance, and the mid-to-late 1980s was no different. She had left Sonny Bono and her variety show days long behind, become a successful solo act as a pop star, and was now well into her serious actress phase, beginning with her supporting role in Mike Nichols’s 1983 based-on-real-life drama Silkwood, which had netted her a Best Supporting Actress nomination. She lost. Cher both wanted an Oscar and also wanted to sort of say “fuck the Oscars” at the same time.
In Moonstruck Cher plays Loretta Castorini, a widow from a big Italian family with a thick New York accent. In the first bit of the film her hair is peppered with gray. She doesn’t wear makeup. She’s marrying a loser of a man—sweet, but nervous and unexciting—who asks her to contact his long-lost brother while he’s in Italy tending to his dying mother. Loretta does as he requests and finds Ronny Cammareri (Nicolas Cage) in the ovens of a local bakery. It turns out that he hates his brother, Loretta’s fiancé, whom he claims is responsible for the loss of his hand and his former bride-to-be. Ronny and Loretta fall in love. It’s not often that romantic comedies get the respect they deserve at the Oscars, but Cher’s performance in Moonstruck is undeniable. She’s both iconic and makes it possible to forget that she’s an icon herself.
Cher had a storied history with the Oscars going back to the 1960s, when she was on the arm of Bono, but she always insisted that she do them her way, even with the knowledge that it might ultimately cost her in the long run. Her decision to wear the intentionally ludicrous getup in 1986 was a reaction to those who thought she was too extravagant, too much of a pop star to be taken seriously as an actress. “I wasn’t going to go at all,” she told the New York Times back in 1987. “And then they asked me to present, these people who had just said, ‘No, you can’t be one of us.’ I thought, ‘O.K., you can go in a simple black dress and be just like everyone else.’ But then I decided, ‘I’m going to remind them of what they don’t like about me.’”
She was aware there might be consequences. In a conversation with Film Comment before her nomination for Moonstruck, she talked about what she called the “trashy part” of her personality. “I continue to do really stupid things—like dress the way I dressed at the Academy Awards . . .” The interviewer interrupted her to ask whether she really thought that was stupid. “No, I thought it was great,” she continued. “But as far as winning friends and influencing people, it’s stupid. But that’s just always going to be me, it’s going to be the way I do stuff because I just have a hard time with authority.” She admitted that she was prepared to “live” with the fact that her antics could mean she might not hold a trophy one day.
But that wasn’t the case. She had tough competition: Her Silkwood costar and friend Meryl Streep in Ironweed, Holly Hunter in Broadcast News, and Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction, but she was a Golden Globe winner going into the April ceremony. The biggest question was not whether she would win, but, yes, what she would wear. The Los Angeles Times breathlessly reported: “There’s only one fashion question worth asking about this year’s Academy Awards show: What’s Cher going to wear Monday night?” Would she once again opt for shock and awe? Or something more conservative to appease the crowd that had presumably cast ballots for her? Mackie dished on what Cher had in mind: “It’s all see-through and black, and what you’d expect of Cher.” He would later tell me that it was “like a beautiful period dress—except there was no underwear.” If you made the gown opaque, it would look like something anyone would wear, really. But with her belly button on display, and the fabric merely a delivery service for thousands of beads, it was just cheeky enough, while still maintaining the kind of elegance you would expect from a winner. The Associated Press called it “far from modest.” She lost an earring made of gunmetal on the way to the stage, a mistake that made her look even cooler in retrospect.
Nothing was going to stop Cher from being Cher. A year later, having achieved the highest honor in the film industry, she went back to dominate the pop world with her single “If I Could Turn Back Time.” She kept the sheer theme going. The video features Cher clad in a leather jacket and a barely there bodysuit on a battleship surrounded by a bunch of sailors.
Excerpted from BEYOND THE BEST DRESSED: A Cultural History of the Most Glamorous, Radical, and Scandalous Oscar Fashion by Esther Zuckerman. Copyright © 2022. Available from Running Press, an imprint of Hachette Book Group, Inc.
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