Amanda de Cadenet’s Best Night Ever With Courtney Love

Lurk around the Internet long enough and you’ll bump into a photo of Amanda de Cadenet: hobnobbing with Sofia Coppola in a Che Guevara shirt or on a red carpet with Keanu Reeves. But there’s one legendary image of the photographer, television host, podcaster, author, entrepreneur, and advocate that makes the rounds more than any other. Ahead, de Cadenet takes NYLON on a walk down memory lane, revisiting the context behind that photograph from the 1995 Oscars — otherwise known as her last great rager.

When I was thinking about my best night ever, it was really difficult because I have had so many best nights. A lot of the nights I don’t remember. I know I was there, because there are photographs, or I remember the legendary stories of birthday parties I’ve had. So I was thinking of the night Courtney Love and I went to the 1995 Academy Awards and an infamous image of Courtney and I wearing these vintage slip dresses with tiaras. We’re smoking cigarettes, and we have red lipstick, and it looks like we’re making out, but we weren’t, really. I remember Courtney saying to me, “If we get this outfit right, this is something that can live on forever.” She is such a marketing genius, and it was really a very thrown-together thing, but she was right. There’s not a year that’s gone by that it hasn’t resurfaced.

We had rented a bungalow at the Chateau Marmont, and our plan was to go to the Vanity Fair party, and then we were going to have our own party at the Chateau. What I do know is that prior to going out, we were getting ready at the Chateau in our bungalow. We had Chateau Marmont fries and burgers — you’ve got to line the stomach with some fats. And I actually recently found images from that night [taken] on my Contax T2 — which is a film camera I’ve had for 25 years — as I’ve been archiving my images. [They’ll] never see the light of day because they’re basically the same as the images you see out in the world minus the dresses.

Courtney had one of the dresses, and then we got another one to match. The tiaras came from this guy I used to buy vintage from on Third Street, who had had too many facelifts. He would let me rummage around in the back of his store. I still have this dress; it’s weirdly in my closet, and I’ve been doing a closet rehab lately. It’s in a Ziploc bag, and I didn’t know what it was, and I opened it up and was like, “This dress.” The train is ripped because my foot got stuck in it, and it’s still got red lipstick on it. It never got cleaned.

I know Jillian Dempsey did our makeup. We wanted old-school movie-star looks, and Jillian’s been doing my makeup since I was 20. She’s so good with a red lip, and you can tell her to do anything, and she’s going to do her version of it. Who did the hair for us? I can’t remember. I just really can’t. Why can’t I remember? Because I was wasted.

[There are] jugs of margaritas in the photos as well. So by the time we got to Vanity Fair, truthfully, I don’t remember much. I’ve seen photos of us sitting at a table with Quentin Tarantino. I had recently been in a film he had made called Four Rooms. We danced; we talked to so many people. There was no Internet at that point, so it was only paparazzi images and the stuff we had taken on my camera. And I’m grateful that was the case, because if my own personal photos are any indication of how the night progressed, God knows what went on.

Vanity Fair is a work party. People, by the time they’re done there, want to really go party. Our party at the bungalow was where everybody came afterwards, and I remember leaving at 5 a.m. with it in full swing. I think there had been a lot of complaints from the residents about the noise. I was dating a guy who hadn’t shown up to the party, and so I left at 5 a.m. to go over to his house. Did I even get into his house? I don’t even remember. I think that night ended up not good for me. It was really an old-school Chateau throwdown, nutty night. It’s so weird to talk about because I was sober literally a few months after this night. It was really the last great rager before I bottomed out. And I say that with love, because the night was the best version you hope to have as a drunk person. I think we did a really good job as two drunk women.

People weren’t used to seeing women together at that point, especially ones that looked like us, super glam with these amazing vintage outfits. And we were holding hands, and there’s an image where it looks like we’re making out, but we’re not — but we’re kissing on the mouth, and people just hadn’t seen that. And so we got a lot of attention.

I think I woke up the next day smelling of alcohol. In hindsight, I must have been coming to the end of something. And even though I’m smiling and laughing, there was a lot of sadness and out-of-control-ness going on. For someone to choose to get sober literally a few months after that night, I know there was a deep sadness inside me. I wrote this article on my Substack, because that image serves to remind me that just because you see people looking fabulous, you don’t know what’s going on inside in their emotional life. And that was true for me that night. It’s taken me a long time to have compassion for myself at that time. It’s a very complex thing to be able to say this was one of the best nights of my life and the worst nights of my life.

I’ve had epic sober nights, but this one was so many things, and that’s why I like it. I’ve had nights that have been as great but completely different as a sober woman. There’s a photo of me with all my girlfriends celebrating Jamie Lee for her Oscar win. I put that [on my Substack] in contrast, because 20 years later, that's my idea of an epic night out. My best nights out now tend to end a lot earlier. I don’t think I’ve been up awake at 5 in the morning probably since then, other than when my kids were born. But having said that, my husband [Nick Valensi] is a touring musician, and I go on tour with The Strokes most summers, and we pull some late ones there because sometimes he’s not on stage until midnight. I have just as much fun as a sober woman today. I just A, remember what I’m doing, and B, I eat better. I’m not waking up with makeup all over my face, and I have my underwear on.