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.
