Imagine, after hours of getting ready, weeks of anticipation, and a nerve-wracking drive to the venue, you finally get to walk the red carpet in the most beautiful outfit you’ve ever worn…only for the zipper to break the second you’re front and center. I’d probably want to run backstage, but the actual professionals know how to handle wardrobe malfunctions with poise and problem-solving.
Here are 27 times celebs suffered major wardrobe malfunctions (and how they handled them):
1.
While Mark Hamill was presenting Best Film at the 2025 BAFTAs, his pants fell down behind the podium. But like a true professional, he pulled them back up and kept going.
2.
While Emma Stone was accepting the Best Actress award at the 2024 Oscars, the zipper on her Louis Vuitton gown broke. Turning around, she said, “Oh boy. My dress is broken. I think it happened during ‘I’m Just Ken.’ I’m pretty sure.”
She later told The Hollywood Reporter, “I made a big deal about busting the zipper, but it really was my fault. I would have busted the most industrial zipper on the planet during ‘I’m Just Ken.'”
3.
Lucy Liu suffered a zipper malfunction at the 2004 Met Gala. She told People, “I was wearing Ungaro, and Giambattista Valli was the designer at the time. [Valli] met me at the hotel, and he was like, ‘Oh my God, the zipper won’t work!’ He had to sew me into the dress, and then I had to cut myself out of it. My stylist was there, too; they were both sewing. I could go to the bathroom; it was just that the side zipper didn’t work. That happens when you have a dress that’s very unique; it just starts to fall apart, unfortunately.”
“I still have the dress, actually. It’s beautiful, but you would have to re-make it to wear it again. It’s pretty chopped up. I could probably take parts of it and then add to the sides or remake it, but the material was very patterned and beautiful. That’s a real story, and I have the evidence. It was great,” she said.
4.
After the 2005 Oscars, Renée Zellweger wasn’t able to keep her Carolina Herrera gown on for all the festivities because someone accidentally tore it. She told British Vogue, “First of all, it’s an incredible dress. I love that dress. It’s weighted and stuffed at the bottom so that it holds its shape. It was a kind of bustle in the back, and I remember that, as we were leaving that night, a gentleman had stepped on the train, and I kept walking in the other direction, and it ripped it right off my dress from right beneath my booty. So, I walked in with that pose, and I left with that pose.”
“And there were parties and things afterwards, but I needed to go home and do a little bit of a costume change. And I realized that I didn’t bring my house key, so I had to climb up the balcony to the second floor and climb in through a little bathroom window in that dress with the hole under my booty,” she said.
5.
In a since-deleted Instagram post, Kate Beckinsale shared a story about the time Keanu Reeves saved her from a wardrobe malfunction when they were promoting Much Ado About Nothing at the 1993 Cannes Film Festival. She said, “I had bought the bodysuit in the Sock Shop at the airport, and when I got in the car to drive to the premiere with Denzel and Pauletta Washington, all the poppers in the crotch popped themselves open, and it flipped up like a roller blind. I didn’t feel it was appropriate to go delving around in my undercarriage with all of us in the back of the car, so I just quietly panicked.”
She continued, “I walked out onto the biggest red carpet of my life and whispered to Keanu and Robert Sean Leonard what had happened. In this picture, I am holding the front gusset down, and the two of them are holding the back gusset. Absolute legends who may not even have fully understood the physics of what was happening or even heard the word ‘gusset’ before, but both jumped in to save me, no questions asked.”
6.
At the 2023 Critics Choice Awards, Amanda Seyfried wore an archival Dior gown, which was made from a single piece of chiffon. She told Access Hollywood, “It keeps breaking. I’m not kidding, it keeps ripping. It’s actually, like, breaking. I’m, like, tacked. I’m just gonna take off my dress. I’m just gonna take it off. It keeps ripping. It’s fine. It’s fine. It literally is. It’s fine. Honestly, it’s old! It’s beautiful!”
As if to prove her point, the dress kept falling during her interivew.
7.
But that wasn’t Amanda Seyfried’s first time dealing with a wardrobe malfunction! At the 2004 Mean Girls premiere, she wore a dress she didn’t realize was see-through. She told Jimmy Kimmel Live, “I did not have a stylist. I used the only money I had to buy a dress — but there were two premieres, and so I had to buy two dresses because you wear different dresses…I didn’t know any of the rules, so I was wearing a white bra and black underwear and no slip. And I paid $600 for that dress. I couldn’t even afford a ride home, no, I’m kidding. I didn’t have a publicist. I didn’t have a stylist. I did my makeup.”
“I slipped through the cracks, because I didn’t ever ask [the movie studio] for anything — because I thought I was in the way. Which is not the way I want to raise my daughter, for sure,” she said.
8.
At the 2023 Oscars, Jenny Slate’s Thom Browne dress was compromised when she got inside. She told Jimmy Kimmel Live, “It was a really, really exciting time, and I’ll also say that my karmic balance really showed up, whatever that is for me, in that we also got lost on the way to the Oscars. Yeah, I mean, first of all, let me back up and say that I was lucky enough to wear a beautiful gown that I was, like, sewn into…like a living doll, but with this personality and these tendencies. And they were like, ‘You’re in!’ And I was like, ‘So when would I go to the bathroom?’ And they were like, ‘Ooh, not our problem, honestly, yeah.’ So I was, like, in the dress — beautiful gown — and I’m also aware that this story is unrelatable in a way, but if it weren’t such an embarrassing tragedy, you know, I wouldn’t tell it at all.”
She said that, eventually, they made it to the ceremony just in time. She continued, “Our award for Best Animated Feature was the first one up. I get on in there. I sit down, and it splits. It’s like pop pop pop pop pop. And guess what was out? My butt…I would say it was half crack…So, we’re the first award up. My butt’s out. We lose right away. Right, so they have you [on camera], ’cause you’re like, ‘I’m so glad that actually I’m the loser!’ And you’re, like, on TV. And I’m like — my husband’s sitting next to me — I’m like, ‘My butt’s out, hehe. My butt’s out, babe. My butt’s out.’ He’s like, ‘Should we leave?’ I’m like, ‘I don’t know. Let’s just go get a drink.’ So we go get a drink. We come back, and our seats have been taken by a team of Belgian filmmakers…”
“So then, we go sit in some seats that are weirdly more on camera, and I’m like, ‘I should just go. Like, let’s just get out of here, man. My butt’s out, and I lost, which is fine.’ And then, I was like, ‘Oh no, I’m actually, like, at a career high right now. Like, I’m in two films, but my butt’s out,'” she said.
9.
At the Scream VI premiere in 2023, Jenna Ortega’s Jean Paul Gaultier Couture had an unexpected added detail — a blue Sharpie stain.
Sharing a picture of the look in a since-deleted Instagram post, she captioned it, “SCREAM VI premiere @screammovies#tiffanyandco #sharpiestainwhogivesashit #imsosorryolivier @olivier_rousteing.”
10.
At the 2014 Met Gala, Hayden Panettiere tripped down the stairs in her Dennis Basso dress. According to Us Weekly, when she got to the top of the steps, she said, “Hallelujah! I made it up the stairs!”
11.
At the European premiere of The Legend of Tarzan in 2016, the zipper on the back of Margot Robbie’s Miu Miu dress broke, so her costar, Alexander Skarsgård, helped her fix it.
12.
When Seth Rogan presented at the 2018 Golden Globes, no one knew his pants were barely held together. He told Late Night with Seth Meyers, “Actually, moments after I saw you [Seth], I had a horrible incident that I have not spoken about. I think I actually just told my wife about it. I saw you at the Golden Globes. I was supposed to go on and present, like, a spiel about The Disaster Artist, and, I’d say, someone came up to me. And I was backstage, and they were like, ‘So, you’re gonna go on in three minutes.’ And I was like, ‘Perfect.’ And then I bent down to pick up something, and I blew out my pants from, like, the very front to the very back. Like chaps. I chaps’ed them. Yeah, like, the whole thing was gone. And I just, I didn’t know what to do.”
He continued, “They were just like, ‘Alright, 60 seconds.’ I frantically — it would take too long to explain it to anyone. So, I grabbed — I just saw a stylist who was, like, I think it was Felicity Jones, her stylist. And I just literally grabbed just, like, a rack of safety pins, went into the bathroom, took my pants off, turned them inside out, pinned them with 15 safety pins all up, making, like, a metallic stitching thing from the base of my butt to the top of my crotch. And then, the second I fastened the last one, they were like, ‘We’re ready for you onstage.’ And I went out with, essentially, like, a diaper made of safety pins holding my pants together.”
13.
When Helen Mirren was heading to a past unspecified red carpet, her resourceful thinking saved her night. She told People, “I did have a problem a long time ago where a zip got stuck, and I couldn’t get in or out of the dress. I was a half an hour late already to hit the red carpet. That was a major malfunction. I went in my closet and found a dress that I bought on sale in an outlet store that had cost — it still had its tag on it — it was $39.99 that I’d paid for it, and I’d never worn it. I put that on, and I was on about six best dressed lists!”
“I’m pretty careful nowadays about wardrobe. I’ve got it down. I know how to avoid that. You’ve got to be really careful, sort of sit in things and bend down in them and just see what happens. So I’m quite good at that.”
14.
During a Borderlands fan event in 2024, Cate Blanchett had a wardrobe malfunction, but her costar, Jamie Lee Curtis, stood behind her to shield her. Jamie told Entertainment Tonight, “Nothing is going on! You know what is going on? I got her back.”
The two stayed closed while posing on the red carpet.
15.
Salma Hayek wore a velvet Gucci gown to the 2022 BAFTAs. Afterwards, she shared pictures of her windswept wardrobe malfunction on Instagram, captioning it, “Sometimes in an effort to cover something other things show up more.”
16.
Kim Kardashian had to quickly get her Jean Paul Gaultier gown fixed at the 2015 Grammys. She told E!, “Basically, my pocket fell off — the whole pocket fell off. When I sat, it ripped, and we were sewing and safety-pinning.”
17.
The little zipper on Kylie Jenner’s Alexander Wang dress at the 2018 Met Gala was a controversial fashion choice, but it turns out, it wasn’t actually supposed to be part of the look in the first place! In a 2020 Instagram story post, she said, “This dress wasn’t supposed to have a zipper but it ripped as I was squeezing into it, so we added it on the way out the door.”
18.
At the 2013 Cannes Film Festival, Eva Longoria lifted her Atelier Versace gown to avoid tripping on the stairs but accidentally revealed she was going commando. However, the next day, she joked about it on Twitter. Sharing a picture of her next red carpet look, she said, “Here’s my dress for tonight! No wardrobe malfunctions tonight!”
19.
Kristen Stewart walked the 2021 Met Gala red carpet in her Chanel look without any problems, but when she got inside, it was another story. She told People, “So I go to the Met ball, and there’s a new set of kids at the Chanel table. There was a beautiful young tennis player [Emma Raducanu] and a young actress [Whitney Peak]. I’m talking to them, saying, ‘Welcome, I’ve done this a couple times,’ and they look like I’m scaring them. I look down, and literally, my [nipple] is in their faces. I was like, ‘Okay, sorry, I’ll put that away now.’ They’re like, ‘Who is this crazy old actress at the Met Ball?’ This is going to be a story for them when they’re older.”
20.
At the 2020 Oscars, Beanie Feldstein accidentally broke her Miu Miu dress. She told W Magazine, “I was wearing a stunning dress that had a halter clasp at the neck. The gown had boning and a sort of shelf for the bust, but there was no bra involved. I’m all about representation, and I’m here to represent big, low-hanging Jewish breasts. The halter on the dress was struggling. It was hanging on for dear life. There was a countdown clock backstage, and there was a minute and 20 seconds left before I had to go on in front of an audience of millions.”
“Next to me was the wall of Oscar statues that they were about to hand out to incredible people. I was nervous and accidentally stepped on the front hem of my dress, and with that step, the clasp gave way. At that point, there was 18 seconds to go. Luckily, someone backstage had a safety pin and reclasped me, but I almost flashed the entire world that night. The moral of this story is, I’m a busty, low-hanging Jewish girl, and you have to be who you are. Which means no more halters,” she said.
21.
Priyanka Chopra Jonas had a wardrobe malfunction shortly before walking the red carpet at the 2019 Cannes Film Festival. In a since-deleted Instagram post, she said, “I may look chill on the outside here, but little did everyone know I had just been freaking out on the inside. The delicate zipper to this vintage [Roberto Cavalli] dress broke as they were zipping it up minutes before I had to leave for the red carpet at Cannes last year. The solution? My amazing team had to sew me into the dress on the way in the five-minute car ride!”
22.
Selena Gomez wore a Celine halter gown to the 2022 Emmys. However, on The Kelly Clarkson Show, she said, “My dress was actually riding up the entire time, so a lot of people saw something they didn’t want to see.” However, Kelly assured Selena she look “so radiant.”
23.
Julia Fox wore a Han Kjøbenhavn dress to the 2022 Vanity Fair Oscars party, but the hand around her neck wouldn’t stay up. So, she had to get creative. She told InStyle, “Oh my God, this look. This is, like, the look that haunts me…The hand was not staying up properly, so I actually had to, like, just use — I had a hair tie, and I made, like, a little makeshift tie in the back to kind of keep it on there ’cause the chokehold was not chokeholding.”
24.
In an Instagram photo dump from the 2024 It Ends with Us premiere, Bethenny Frankel shared picture of her dress — and its demise. In a video, she said, “My strap of my dress came off. I was in the rain. My shoes that are gorgeous are soaked. The wheels are off. I can’t go out. This is why nobody takes me anywhere. It’s a frickin’ disaster.”
Here’s what her outfit looked like before.
25.
At the 1997 Oscars, Jenny McCarthy wore a Valentino gown — but the designer called her out for wearing it wrong! She told Live with Kelly and Mark, “Well, the funny thing is, I went to the Oscars once. They invited me when I was the It girl. They invite the It girl each year. I only was invited once, obviously. But I literally was working at a Polish grocery store a year and a half prior to me going to the Oscars, so I just didn’t know much. They put me in a Valentino dress — I didn’t know I wore the dress backwards. Valnetino comes up to me…I said, ‘Oh my God, Valentino, thank you for letting me borrow this dress!’ He goes, ‘You’re wearing it backwards.’ I was like, ‘Ohhhh….’ But you know what, it doesn’t surprise me. I was smelling like Polish sausage still from working the deli!”
26.
At the 2018 FX All-Star Party, Desmin Borges jumped in the air…
27.
And finally, Anne Hathaway almost didn’t make it to the 2014 Met Gala because of a last-minute issue with her Calvin Klein gown. On The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, she said, “I was about a block away from the Met, and I was like, ‘Wow, this is amaz— achoo!’ And I sneezed, and my dress, like, just straight up split open…I felt so terrible. So, I’m pulling up, and Francisco [Costa, the designer] was so proud of this dress. And I put the window down, and he’s like, ‘Baby, you look amazing.’ I’m like, ‘Thank you so much! My dress just broke.’ And I’ve never actually seen someone turn green before, and he did.”
She continued, “I’m like, ‘It’s gonna be fine. I can go on the carpet. I’m gonna keep my arm down, and I’ll hold it in place. And we’ll get inside, and there’s gonna be a needle and thread.’ And he goes, ‘Pull over!’ So we pulled over, went to a hotel. They found a seamstress. She sewed me into it, and the big thing was, ‘are we gonna make it in time for the red carpet?’ because it takes a minute. So we show up. There’s nobody on the red carpet. I say, ‘Oh my God, did they miss it?’ And they said, ‘You’re just ahead of Rihanna! Go!’ Apparently, the only rule you really can’t break at the Met Ball is you cannot show up after Rihanna. That’s just gauche.”
