The making of Penelope Cruz's Chanel Oscars dress

Penelope Cruz is always one of our favourites to look out for on the red carpet, thanks to her consistently classic style. But as one of the Leading Actress nominees at this year's Academy Awards, following her moving performance in Pedro Almódovar's Parallel Mothers, no ordinary dress would do.

The star hit the red carpet in a look perfectly befitting an Oscar nominee, wearing an elegant halter-neck ballgown by Chanel.

The taffeta open-back dress was custom-made for the actress and inspired by a look from the Haute Couture autumn/winter 2020 collection. The gown's design and construction required an incredible 680 hours of work and featured 8,000 embroidered elements.

Virgile Guinard

Virgile Guinard

Checkered graphic embroidery was formed to create a 'metallic tweed' effect, and applied as a necklace around the neckline, while the bow was hand-embroidered using Lunéville crochet (a specialist technique, also known as tambour embroidery, founded in the French town of Lunéville), with blue and silver glitter sequins.

Virgile Guinard

Virgile Guinard

She completed her look with Chanel shoes and Chanel High Jewellery earrings and rings.

When it came to her beauty look, Cruz's make-up by Charlotte Tilbury featured a sultry smoky eye with sun-kissed glowing skin, while her side-swept waves conveyed a cool girl effortlessness.

Virgile Guinard

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Parallel Mothers, Cruz's seventh collaboration with the visionary director Pedro Almódovar, is a Spanish-language drama that brilliantly explores the nature of the maternal bond in all its guises, placing a deeply personal story of two single mothers bound by unexpected ties within a wider historical framework about the debt we owe to generations past.

Virgile Guinard

Earlier this year, the actress told us about the exhausting and often draining process of filming the project.

"Sometimes, at the end of the day, I was not a person," she said. "I just had to be picked up from the floor, and Pedro, Milena and I would help each other – we might take an extra hour to cry it out, to attempt to come back to reality, because it wasn’t like you could just press a button,” she recalls. “I didn’t want to go home taking that energy with me."

Read our full interview with Cruz, below:

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