Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt were big crowd pleasers at the recent Toronto Film Festival premiere of Pitt’s new movie Moneyball.
On a call earlier that day to see a ‘lady with a dress’ at a downtown hotel, I found myself up close with Miss Jolie and the Vivienne Westwood Couture gown currently in a proliferation of photos all over the internet, in magazines, and an instant top subject for fashion and celebrity blog analyses.
The dress was beautiful. We decided the length was perfect and admired the gold Vuitton clutch with chain and cuff that is now the talk of the blogs. What the fashionista blogistas miss about her outfit, it seems to me, is how it succeeds in bringing a punk aesthetic to the generally boring and banal red carpet circus.
Vivienne Westwood is the original enfant terrible of British fashion, and Jolie is the most appropriate of stars for her clothes. I’ve met other big stars over the years through my work as a tailor where of course, discretion is crucial. But people always ask: “like who?”
One of my first fame-brushing jobs was on Sandra Bullock’s Vanity Fair cover shoot in Chester, Nova Scotia, back in 1995. The wardrobe they brought along was amazing.
In Toronto, aka “Hollywood North”, my favorite celebrity meeting was fitting a suit for Jack Tripper I mean John Ritter, for a 1999 TV movie.
Ritter made Three’s Company’s sitcom misunderstandings hilarious.
Regretfully, 1999 was just before I got into country music history, so I didn’t know that his father was singing cowboy Tex, and his mother Dorothy a former western film actress even more famous for her years as a greeter at the Grand Old Opry.
Tex Ritter had many hits from the 40s to the 60s, like “Rye Whiskey”, “Froggy Went A-Courtin’”, “I Dreamed of a Hillbilly Heaven” and “Blood on the Saddle”. His signature is the haunting “Do Not Forsake Me, Oh My Darlin”, also known as “The Ballad of High Noon” from the 1952 Gary Cooper movie.
Obviously, meeting Angelina was also quite incredible. If it wasn’t all business, what might I have said? Asked what it’s like to be one of the most famous people in the world? Or about her Oscar-winning role as a psychiatric patient in Girl, Interrupted?
I don’t really need to talk to Angelina, though, about anything except the length of her dress. Besides, there will always be a reminder of meeting her in the picture of Dustin Hoffman and her father on the board in my studio.
