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On the eve of the 2023 Oscars—the calm before the flashbulb storm—Hong Chau called from Los Angeles after a final fitting with her stylist duo, Zadrian Smith and Sarah Edmiston. All was going swimmingly. The custom Prada dress, a pink silk column with a black train resembling glass shards, had arrived fitting like a glove, no alterations needed. (A minor miracle during awards season, which Edmiston described as “like Squid Game, but with a lot of beautiful dresses.”) Still, swanning is not the actor’s usual mode. “I definitely do not feel at home on a red carpet,” said Chau, who, as a film student, initially took an acting class as a means of overcoming her shyness. “I think there’s just so much going on, and I’m not sure anybody is really present,” she explained, describing an environment where interactions feel clipped and commodified. “Even if I’ve just met you, I still yearn for a genuine interaction.”
That conscientiousness is unsurprising to fans of Chau’s work. In The Menu, director Mark Mylod’s dark tour through the ultra-rich playground of fine dining, Chau breathed specificity into the loosely drawn role of the maître d’. “They thought Elsa should be unremarkable and very plain-dressed,” Chau told Vogue last year, describing how she and costume designer Amy Wescott instead sharpened the character’s costume and look. This was not your standard hospitality pro or chef groupie: “I likened her more to a campaign manager for a political candidate”—fastidious without being flashy.
Even for her Oscar-nominated turn as the nurse Liz in The Whale, a role whose contours were well defined in the original play by Samuel D. Hunter, Chau floated a special request past director Darren Aronofsky: that her character have tattoos, even if they’d end up being hidden from view. The actor sent early inspiration images to makeup department head Judy Chin, including a dumpling with a star. “We had a good giggle,” Chau told me, adding that she was particularly struck by one of Chin’s hand-drawn designs. “It was two koi fish—a larger one for Charlie and a smaller one for Alan—and they were kind of wrapped around each other. It was so beautiful.” Freed of the usual hours in hair and makeup (Chau, then a new mother, was able to embrace her own bare-faced exhaustion for the part), she leaned into the ritual of the tattoo application. “It was a nice time for me to settle into the character because I was just coming from home, where I was nursing a baby,” Chau said. “I needed that, looking back on it.”
The emotionally raw world of The Whale couldn’t be further from the frothy Oscars, where every head-to-toe detail is finessed. “I think that’s why nobody ever recognizes me when I’m on the carpet: because I look so different from my characters,” said Chau, who started working with Zadrian & Sarah (as the team is professionally known) in late January. The stylists, speaking over Zoom on Saturday afternoon, recalled Chau specifically stating that fashion would be a secondary concern for her—and an individualistic one. “She did not want to emulate old-school Hollywood glamour, or any era that did not represent her as a woman,” said Smith. As a result, their pulls for Chau these past few weeks have reflected a self-reflective and forward-thinking mix of designers: Simone Rocha, Dries Van Noten, Rodarte, Jason Wu.
For the grand finale, it was to be custom Prada. A handful of sketches arrived; Chau gravitated toward one and then, as it happens, had an idea. “I was like, ‘I don’t know if you’re going to be very offended by this, but I just wanted to incorporate my roots a little bit,” she told me, recalling how she sent along a photo of a spring 1997 Prada dress with a mandarin collar. (Chau’s parents left Vietnam as postwar refugees, eventually settling in New Orleans.) The suggestion was a winning one. “It felt like there was a little bit of a collaboration going on, which I feel so humbled to be a part of,” she said. The dress “just feels very me—and I feel nimble in it.”
A similar sense of ease carried above the neck, with a team—Derek Yuen on hair, Fiona Stiles on makeup—that has worked together all awards season long. “I love Fiona’s ability to just give you very natural, breathable skin,” Chau said, marveling at the way Stiles once removed trace amounts of makeup with a Q-Tip, to better let her freckles shine through. (Stiles also used the TheraFace PRO tool, alternating between cold and warm settings to wake up the skin.) For Yuen, the Oscars offered an updo opportunity—a sleek double bun—without the helmet-head feel of too much product. “It all feels very light and effortless,” she said.
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