By Christopher Turner
When Australian costume designer Lizzy Gardiner stepped onto the Academy Awards red carpet on March 27, 1995, she immediately turned heads. Love it or hate it, her dress certainly made a statement. Gardiner, who was nominated that night for an Oscar for her costumes in The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, was decked out in a dress made of American Express Gold cards, a fashion statement that resounded for years to come.
Gardiner’s shimmering spaghetti strap floor-length outfit, complete with gold underwear and matching platforms, undoubtedly left an indelible mark on Oscar and fashion history. Here’s everything you ever wanted to know about the much-loved – and much-hated – American Express Gold Card dress that she wore to the 1995 Oscars, including how it came to be and where it is today.
The adventure starts…
The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert is a 1994 film about two drag queens and a transgender woman (Hugo Weaving, Guy Pearce and Terence Stamp) travelling across the Australian outback in an old bus named “Priscilla.” The three performers are en route from Sydney to a resort in Alice Springs, and along the way they encounter enthusiastic crowds, homophobic locals and hostility in nearly every town. Written and directed by Stephan Elliott, the film was a surprise worldwide hit, introducing the world of drag queens to many in the mainstream audience.
Of course, the costumes in the film were part of the film’s appeal.… They were big, outrageous and incredibly flamboyant! With a budget of just $20,000 for the film, Gardiner and her partner, Tim Chappel turned out some truly provocative pieces, from a dress made out of orange and pink thongs to Guy Pearce’s iconic silver wings costume that he wears on top of the Priscilla bus in the middle of the desert.
The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert received numerous nominations and accolades after its release, but the biggest prize was the film’s sole Oscar nomination, for Best Costume Design, for Gardiner and Chappel.
Oscar night
On March 27, 1995, Gardiner stepped onto the red carpet at the 67th annual Academy Awards wearing a gold floor-length dress with slim gold straps at the top, that was made of 254 American Express Gold cards linked together with gold-toned links and hooks. Gardiner complemented the dress with a giant gold organza wrap, gold underwear underneath, and a pair of chunky gold platform heels.
“I’m broke, and I didn’t have anything to wear,” Gardiner told reporters on the red carpet, explaining the genesis of her Oscars outfit. “So I went through my list of past good ideas.”
Not surprisingly, the Amex Oscar dress, along with other costumes for Priscilla, was inspired by Sydney’s drag queen culture of the late 1990s. Gardiner had originally envisaged one of the movie’s three protagonists wearing a credit card dress, but once the film was in production, American Express and multiple other banks reportedly turned down the opportunity to have their cards appear as a dress in the production. (Instead, she ended up creating a dress made entirely from pink and orange flip flips.)
After the film’s success, and the Oscar nomination, American Express had a change of heart and provided the cards for Gardiner to bring her vision to life.
American Express – which was, incidentally, one of the Oscar’s sponsors that year – sent over 300 cards that Gardiner and Salvador Perez, a designer from Los Angeles, assembled into a gown in approximately 12 hours. The cards were all joined together with wire and the dress had a split almost up to the waist.
A spokesperson for the brand explained the change of heart in an interview published by the Los Angeles Times at the time: “It’s different.… She’s not dressing a character. She’s dressing herself.”
So, the cards used to create Gardiner’s Oscar dress were all genuine – albeit expired – Amexes, with Gardiner’s name on every single one. The cards did, however, lack a digit, rendering them all invalid.
Sharon Stone presented the Oscar for Costume Design with The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert; Bullets Over Broadway; Little Women; Maverick and Queen Margot all competing for the honour.
“Tomorrow when the post-mortems take place in the press and television, a great deal of time and space will be concerned with who wore what and how they looked at tonight’s ceremonies,” Stone said – perhaps she had an inkling of the unprecedented amount of coverage Gardiner’s dress would receive.
After Gardiner and Chappel accepted the Oscar for Costume Design and left the stage, host David Letterman (who was hosting the Oscars for the first time that evening) joked, “Yes, siree. I’m tellin’ ya, American Express can’t buy publicity like that.”
After the Oscars
In the days that followed the ceremony, Gardiner’s American Express Gold Card dress, unsurprisingly, caused quite the commotion. It was universally panned as tacky, and the designer later admitted: “On the night, it really upset a lot of people. A lot of women, I think they felt upstaged or pissed off that I wasn’t taking things as seriously as I should.”
Almost immediately after Oscar night, American Express ran an ad that ran in North American newspapers featuring a grinning Gardiner wearing the gold dress on Oscar night. And shortly after that, American Express announced that it had bought the glittery, floor-length dress from Gardiner for an undisclosed price, according to the Los Angeles Times. The brand planned to display the dress in travel offices around the country.
But that wasn’t the end of the dress. A few years later, in March 1999, an exact replica of the dress was auctioned off by Christie’s for charity for $12,650, with the proceeds going to AmfAR, The Foundation for AIDS Research. Today, Gardiner’s actual American Express Gold Card dress is on display at the National Gallery of Victoria, popularly known as the NGV, in Melbourne, Australia.
While it’s been dubbed one of the worst Oscar dresses of all time, Gardiner had the last laugh. After all, we’re still talking about it today…and Gardiner still went home with an Oscar that night.
