George Clooney is renowned for his film talent, good looks, humanitarian efforts…and his tailoring skills?
The day of the 2010 Oscars, Clooney’s arm candy du jour — Italian actress Elisabetta Canalis — split the back of her Cavalli dress just before she was due to walk the red carpet with her beau.
Hair stylist Jonathan Antin was part of Canalis’ glam squad, and he was stunned when Clooney volunteered to stitch her up.
“George said, ‘Hold on a second, I have experience with this. I used to work on suits, honey,’” Antin said. Clooney then “grabbed the needle and thread and started sewing her zipper in. He did an amazing job.”
In Hollywood, looking good at the Oscars is as important as winning. But even when a female Oscars-goer has endured weeks of fretting over dresses, undergoing fittings and dieting to ensure svelteness, things can go very wrong.
And not everyone has Clooney ready and waiting with a needle and thread.
“My very first step on the red carpet, someone stepped on the hem of my dress and the beads just started unraveling…There [were] a hundred silver beads on the carpet,” actress Judy Greer recalled of her 2012 Oscars debut, when she was nominated for Best Supporting Actress for “The Descendants.”
“I was starting to get trampled…My publicist was on all fours in front of me trying to sew my [Monique Lhuillier] dress back together.”
Greer admitted she struggled to maintain composure — “I was sobbing inside” — but managed to keep a smile on her face.
Even more impressive was the cool calm displayed by Alicia Keys at the Academy Awards in 2009. As she strode onstage to present an award with Zac Efron, the heel of one of the singer’s Jimmy Choos broke off.
“She walked on the ball of her foot so that nobody would know what had happened under her long dress,” an assistant who worked backstage recounts to The Post. “She was very calm and professional.”
“Fashion Police” co-host Giuliana Rancic couldn’t play it off last year when the zipper of her Paolo Sebastian dress busted, though. After all, she was on the air at the time, interviewing the biggest stars of the night.
“When we went to the next break, my stylist came in and sewed it really quickly,” Rancic recalled. “But at the end of the night, I had to be cut out of the dress.”
So did Olivia Munn in 2013. Clad in a stunning Marchesa with a fishtail train, the actress took a deep breath before leaving the house — and popped the zipper. “I’m literally sewn in” to the dress, she revealed on the red carpet shortly after.
That’s nothing compared to Barbra Streisand, whose Arnold Scaasi pantsuit ripped as she was walking onstage to accept her 1969 Best Actress award for “Funny Girl.” Adding to the humiliation: The sheer outfit left her doubly exposed.
“I didn’t realize the outfit was so see-through,” Streisand told InStyle magazine decades later. “You couldn’t tell that in the dressing room, only under the bright lights.
Such a sheer slip-up is avoidable today, says stylist and former “Fashion Police” co-host George Kotsiopoulos. “As a stylist you have to take pictures of dresses from all angles, and with all types of lighting.”
Which means Gwyneth Paltrow’s see-through look in 2002 was probably no mistake.
“The gothic Alexander McQueen dress that she wore without a bra was horrific,” Kotsiopoulos says.
But a former associate of Paltrow’s, who asked not to be named, tells The Post that the actress was adamant that she wanted to look edgy that night.
“Celebs surround themselves with sycophants,” the insider says, “and nobody wanted to be the one to tell her how dreadful she looked, or to put on a damned bra.”
Still, when something goes wrong, stylists are on the firing line — they can lose both the client and their reputation if an Oscars look isn’t deemed a success — and stars’ “artistic temperaments” make the job challenging.
“Some big names are notoriously difficult,” stylist Lindsay Albanese tells The Post. “As a stylist, no matter how stressful or ridiculous the request, you have to do it with a smile.”
“I was styling someone and I didn’t think their hair was right,” Kotsiopoulos remembers. “The girl liked it and we were running late…I wasn’t going to be the s–t-stirrer who’d make her think she looked ugly.”
Eventually, he says, the celebrity came to her senses — “but it had to come from her.”
Let’s just assume Jenny McCarthy didn’t even have a stylist back in 1997.
“I wore a Valentino dress and I actually wore it backwards,” McCarthy said. “I was wondering why it was so tight in the boobs…I didn’t realize I was wearing it backwards till Valentino came up to me at the Vanity Fair party and said, ‘Darling, you’re wearing my dress backwards.’”
Oprah Winfrey has described her first Oscars appearance in 1986 -— she was nominated for Best Supporting Actress for “The Color Purple” — as “one of the most horrible nights of my life.”
“I had used Dolly Parton’s dressmaker…[But] I didn’t try the dress on,” she explained. “So when I went to put it on half an hour before the Oscars…I couldn’t get it over my hips.”
Winfrey’s hairdresser had to lay her on the floor “and push [in] my butt and zip it, so I rode to the Oscars — really, no exaggeration — planked in the back of a limousine.”
Julianne Moore, a frontrunner this year to win Best Actress for “Still Alice,” needn’t fret about any impending tailoring disaster — she could fix the problem herself.
Moore came to the rescue of Charlize Theron when the latter’s tangerine-hued Vera Wang gown ripped at an after-party for the 2000 Academy Awards ceremony.
“It was probably a bad idea going to the Oscars with a train,” Theron said. “I went to this gala dinner after, and someone stepped on it…and ripped the tail off the dress. It made a hole in [the] backside.”
Luckily, Moore was able to spare Theron’s blushes. “Julianne…was on all fours with a safety pin, with her hands underneath the dress, pinning it together.”
Even when the worst happens, stars would do well to retain a sense of humor. “A less-than-perfect look can humanize a celebrity,” says Bronwyn Cosgrave, author of “Made For Each Other: Fashion and the Academy Awards.”
”I always say that stylists are like Botox — the more you use them, the less character you see.”