With One Bare Leg, a New Angelina Jolie Was Born
At the 2012 Oscars, Angelina Jolie's power stance remade her image from goth wild child to a carefully filtered filmmaker.
If you asked someone to name an iconic Angelia Jolie Oscar dress, you would probably get one of two answers. Though Jolie’s been to the Oscars numerous times—starting when she was a child and attending with her nominated father Jon Voight in 1986—there is a pair of ensembles that has permeated the pop cultural landscape in a way none of her other looks have. The first was in 2000, when she was nominated and won for her performance in Girl, Interrupted. Jolie showed up in a skintight black gown designed by Marc Bouwer, covering every inch of her body in fabric but still leaving little to the imagination. Her hair was dyed nearly black and elongated with extensions. Most people compared her to Morticia Addams. Elvira could also work as a description.
Years later there’s Jolie’s other most famous Oscar look. In 2000, Jolie looked malleable, her body gliding across the carpet and, notoriously, into the arms of her brother. She looked like she could wilt if she wanted to, dissolve into liquid. Not so in 2012. Jolie arrived in Atelier Versace, almost as if she had been cast into stone. She was the epitome of statuesque. Her head was erect, her arms toned, and, of course, her right leg jutted out stiffly from a thigh-high slit. That leg became an immediate meme, affixed onto all sorts of images, including the Statue of Liberty.
If Jolie in 2000 was all spontaneity, declaring to many people’s shock how “in love” she was with her brother, Jolie in 2012 was practiced. No longer was she the goth girl talking about wearing vials of Billy Bob Thornton’s blood around her neck. She was a director, activist, and mother to children, both biological and adopted, with Brad Pitt, the other biggest movie star alive. They were the king and queen of this place. And she looked regal, almost waxy, like she should be in a museum.
Arguably no star has changed more radically during her time in the public eye than Angelina Jolie. When she first became famous in the late 1990s, she was known for her unpredictability. She married Jonny Lee Miller in 1996 in rubber pants and a T-shirt with his name written on it in blood. A 1999 Rolling Stone profile opens with her showing off her tattoos and discussing her bisexuality. She was, yes, the daughter of a very famous actor, but she was also dangerous in a way few ingenues were.
Her role in Girl, Interrupted capitalized on this. With blonde hair, she is seductive as the sociopathic rebel Winona Ryder’s protagonist meets in a psychiatric hospital in 1967. Despite a cast filled with some of the most fascinating actresses of her generation, as Lisa, Jolie is the most captivating person on-screen, mean and teasing, yet someone to whom you can’t help but be drawn.
Lisa was also the type of person the public assumed Angelina Jolie was at the time: uninhibited, maybe a little unstable. And Angelina Jolie did nothing to dissuade people of that notion. On the red carpet, when Tyra Banks asked her how she “transformed herself” for the part, she said, “all those deep dark secrets. I went into a scary place and stayed there for a while.” Which brings us to her Morticia Addams look. She looked like a harbinger of evil, not glory. One paper deemed the outfit “weird but memorable”; another called her a “fashion victim.”
Her outfit was strange, but not scandalous. What was scandalous was the fact that she seemed intent on professing her love for her brother, which culminated in a kiss at the Vanity Fair party following the ceremony. In photos from the event it looked like they were making out, which wasn’t really the case.
“Angelina had a reputation as a rebellious young actress, so I think the kiss was seen in context of her being a bit of a wild child,” Hollywood Life founder Bonnie Fuller told Bustle for an oral history of that moment. “Apparently, it was a very quick kiss—which you can’t tell by looking at the photo.” The combination of the look and the kiss branded Jolie as an incestuous sexpot obsessed with blood.
But Jolie quickly started to evolve her image. A year after her Oscar win she became a UN Goodwill ambassador. The following year she adopted her first child, Maddox, from Cambodia, the country where she focused the majority of her humanitarian attentions. Her relationship with Pitt started as a rumored affair when he was still married to Jennifer Aniston, but by the time 2012 rolled around that felt to many like ancient history. Pitt and Jolie were not yet married, but he had become a legal parent to her adopted children, and they had had three of their own together. She was slowing down her appearances in films, transitioning into work as a director. The previous year she wrote and directed her first feature, In the Land of Blood and Honey. It didn’t make a mark at the Oscars, but it had netted a Golden Globe nomination for Best Foreign Language Film.
In some ways, the 2012 Oscars were her debut not as an actress, but as a filmmaker, striving to tell stories about war-torn lands. She later explained that she chose the Versace gown because it was more comfortable than her other option. It’s curious reasoning because Jolie didn’t look very comfortable. She was constantly posing. Though “showing leg” can often be sexy, in this case it wasn’t. It almost felt obligatory. Even baring skin, she felt guarded. The stance was less one of seduction than one of power, as if she could wield that leg at any moment and step on your neck.
In 12 years’ time, Jolie went from a woman whose lack of filter was one of her defining features to someone who seemed like she was all filter. She began as a wild card who would blurt out whatever was on her mind, wearing a getup that looked like every kid’s idea of someone scary. She ended up as a matron, fiercely protective of her image, never a hair, or leg, out of place.