Though the broadcast itself was last night, for Basil Walter and Will Cooper, Oscar season starts in the summer. That’s when the designers for the Vanity Fair Oscar party begin planning their creative direction for the exclusive soirée at the Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts in Beverly Hills, where, as Cooper puts it, the “crème de la crème of culture” rub shoulders after the Academy Awards ceremony comes to a close. “As a beginning, I thought about what was happening culturally,” Cooper, who returned for his second year designing the event, tells AD. “I posed a question to everyone, which was, ‘Is this the dawning of the age of Aquarius?’”
The former creative director of Ash—an Aquarius himself—was thinking about the musical Hair and its certified platinum song, “Aquarius/Let the Sunshine In,” which dominated the charts in the spring of 1969. He couldn’t help but compare that period with our current era. “We were coming out of a depressive moment with the Vietnam War,” Cooper says, and people were tapping into “the hedonism of existence, of being human beings again.” Perhaps we aren’t quite out of our current slump—“there is an inherent ‘what the hell is happening in the world’ kind of depression [happening now],” Walter says—but couldn’t we fast forward to the good part, if only for a night? And so a heavy dose of escapism straight from the ’70s was in order. On the mood board: Biba, Studio 54, and Soul Train.
The night’s best actor and actress winners, Adrien Brody (The Brutalist) and Mikey Madison (Anora), as well as an assortment of celebrities of all stripes, including John Waters, Kim Kardashian, Keke Palmer, Mick Jagger, Nancy Pelosi, Monica Lewinsky, and Serena Williams, passed through an unassuming corrugated metal façade with a storefront-esque “Vanity Fair” awning to enter the event space. “We were looking at discotheques from the ’70s and ’80s [that] existed in these weird back-alley places or in warehouses outside of town,” Cooper explains. “Last year, if you recall, it was like walking into a grand hotel. This year, it was [like] walking into this speakeasy, nondescript thing that you just stumble into on the street.”
Once inside, guests walked the silver-and-gold-striped carpet and traversed mirrored passageways that pulled inspiration from Carlo Mollino’s Teatro Regio and Sir John Soane’s Museum in London before emerging into an entrance lounge. At its heart, a conversation pit was furnished with modular seating upholstered in sunset-hued velvet. A ginormous disco ball crowned the space, adding “spatial exuberance,” as Walter, who has designed for the A-list gathering since 1998, says.
