Sharon Stone has worn striking gowns from Valentino, Schiaparelli, Zuhair Murad and other high-fashion brands over her career. More recently, she even became a muse for Sam Smith during their “Saturday Night Live” performance in January. However, she wasn’t always disputed by luxurious designers and pop stars.
In a new episode of the “Table for Two” podcast released this Tuesday, Stone revealed to host Bruce Bozzi how hard it was to find a dress for her first Oscar Awards in 1992. “When I first got invited to the Oscars, right before ‘Basic Instinct’ came out, the movie hadn’t come out, so no one would lend me a dress. And then it came out, a few days before the Oscars, and I was going to present but no one would lend me a dress,” she recalled. “It was unbelievable because I didn’t have any money.”
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Stone felt intimidated arriving on the red carpet for the ceremony. “All these people in their $40,000 or $50,000 dresses and I went and bought a Betsey Johnson polyester jumpsuit, because that was the best I could do,” she said.
Stone was also her own beauty squad. “I’m doing my own hair and makeup and I was just like, ‘Wow, this is awful. Like, how am I going to do this, right?’” she told Bozzi.
Once inside the theater where the Oscars took place, Stone had a better experience. “I got there and I was like in the fourth or fifth row back, which was really good. And I was on the aisle, and I was seated right behind Anthony Hopkins, and when I walked by, he put his hands together and put them over his head like a champion and held them up to me when I passed him. I was like, ‘Oh my God, he saw my movie’,” the actress recalled.
Stone revealed her dad’s advice after the Oscars. “I told my dad, and my dad was like, ‘Kid, you could look good in a burlap sack.’ I was like ‘Oh, right.’ So after that, I thought, ‘It doesn’t matter, I can wear a T-shirt to the Oscars so I did,” she said.
In 1996, Stone famously showed up to the Oscars red carpet wearing a Gap shirt paired with an Armani tuxedo dress. She had initially planned to wear a Vera Wang dress for the event, but had to change it last minute.
“We were making this other great dress, this pink dress, and it came and the FedEx guy dropped it out of the back of his truck and backed up over it. The box broke open, and the dress had a black tire track down the whole front. The day before the Oscars,” Stone told Naomi Campbell in 2020, on the “No Filter With Naomi” YouTube series.