Someone Stole Lupita Nyong'o's $150K Oscar Gown
Lupita Nyong’o wore a spectacular pearl-covered gown by Calvin Klein to the 2015 Academy Awards. Photo: Getty Images
On the one hand, you want your dress to get a lot of attention at the Oscars. Those pictures last forever, and a great dress lands you on all the right lists and in all the right headlines. But it turns out there is such a thing as too much positive attention: you don’t want so much that someone sets out to steal it!
Lupita Nyong’o’s white Calvin Klein gown might have earned the most buzz on Sunday night. The actress worked with designer Francisco Costa to create the the halter-neck silhouette, covered with over 6,000 natural pearls; the dress is worth approximately $150,000. “It was so much fun to create this dress. We talked about it being fluid and liquid. I wanted it to be an homage to the sea,” she told Yahoo Style. She wasn’t worried about losing a pearl or two—”They’re sewn on quite tightly.”—but maybe she should’ve worried about losing the whole thing?
The New York Daily News confirms a TMZ report that Nyong’o’s gown was stolen from her room at the London Hotel in West Hollywood on Tuesday. And since actresses rarely (if ever) own their red carpet gowns, the Oscar winner wasn’t even able to file a police report; Calvin Klein will have to do so. “We got a call at about 11:30 last night from someone at the London Hotel about a high value dress that was stolen from a hotel room,” Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department Officer John Mitchell told the paper.
The bad news is that dozens of people had access to Nyong’o’s hotel room: hair stylists, makeup artists, managers, agents, friends, and stylists. The good news is that hotels have surveillance cameras and that dress looks particularly heavy, so it should be easy to catch the thief walking out of Nyong’o’s room with the dress. TMZ reports that the police are reviewing tape from 9AM to 8PM yesterday, when the actress wasn’t in the room. The sad truth is, it probably wouldn’t ever be worn again anyway.
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