“We won’t be telling you anything,” Karla Welch teased about America Ferrera’s Oscars look.
“Don’t ask us,” Ferrera smiled.
“It’s iconic,” added Welch, her longtime stylist.
Welch was cohost with Levi’s on Friday evening in honor of Ferrera’s Best Supporting Actress nomination and Women’s History Month. The denim brand brought together Ferrera’s “Barbie” costars Ana Cruz Kayne and Ariana Greenblatt, director Greta Gerwig, Tracee Ellis Ross and Ari Graynor for an intimate night of omakase courtesy of Morihiro at their Los Angeles showroom, Levi’s Haus.
“Well, they gave me the traveling pants and for that I am forever grateful,” Ferrera joked, when reminded of the jeans at the center of “The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants,” the 2005 film featuring a pair of Levi’s that mysteriously fits each girl in a friend group perfectly, despite their different sizes.
“The best jeans ever,” said Welch. “There’s no debate.”
Guests were gifted vintage Levi’s Trucker jackets that could be customized with embroidery, along with the ultimate “America” patch to mark the occasion — designed in a Barbie-inspired pink-and-white logo.
“I will say that the ‘Barbie’ tour is gonna go down in my career. Every look from when we started last year through where we’re about to end has been f—king amazing, pardon the language. I was like, ‘I think this is the best tour I’ve ever done,’” said Welch. “People say, ‘Oh you didn’t do a Barbie theme. But people need to remember, Barbie is whoever you and your imagination want Barbie to be.”
“We always start from a place of character, interestingly,” Ferrera said of their collaboration. “It’s like, ‘Who are we going to be?’”
Who is she channeling on Sunday?
“Oscar nominated movie star and icon,” Welch jumped in. “Where is the lie?”
“There’s no lie,” Ferrera laughed.
Asked about their first meeting, Ferrera was candid about her relationship with fashion.
“I remember I had not such a great fitting with a stylist I was working with and feeling really down,” she explained of her early days in Hollywood. “I started my career when I was 17 in a time when it was normal to show up at a cover photo shoot and have no clothes that fit me, because they’d only pulled samples. Right from the beginning, I would feel like I was the problem, like I had failed to fit into the right clothes — even though I was promoting a film called ‘Real Women Have Curves.’”
Ferrera had her breakout role playing a first-generation Mexican-American in the Patricia Cardoso film, before later making waves in the ABC TV series “Ugly Betty.” Now 39, she’s become a director and producer, who’s known to advocate for women’s rights, immigrants and Latinx.
“So, I’d had a kind of really tumultuous relationship with fashion and red carpets,” she continued. “And it never made me feel good about myself. It actually made me feel really anxious and small, and like I was always failing. Nothing about it was empowering. It was all very scary. And I was not a model, I was an actress.”
When she began working with Welch in 2014, a suggestion from her former publicist, it was a game changer.
“Every single thing she put on me, the fit was beautiful,” Ferrera said. “It was well made and gorgeous and high fashion, and I was just amazed. The clothes, but also Karla, made me feel so strong and seen. And that was 10 years ago. And she’s dressed me through my two pregnancies, when I was a triathlete in the best shape of my life, when I haven’t worked out for two years, when I…”
“When you literally called me two days before the Oscars saying, ‘I’m going to the Oscars,’” Welch interjected.
“She literally fit me the day before the Oscars, and it was great,” said Ferrera. It was 2015, the year she wore chiffon green Jenny Packham, she recalled.
“It was the beginning of, for me, an evolution in my relationship to my body and to my beauty,” Ferrera went on, of working with Welch. “I feel like I’ve gotten to feel beautiful, have fun, feel empowered and get to kind of dress up as whatever version of myself I want to be.”
