Olandria Carthen landed in Los Angeles the morning before her first BET Awards with two outfit changes mapped out, rehearsals on the schedule, and nerves she admitted she had not felt since walking a red carpet at Sports Illustrated launch week more than a month earlier. The stakes were different this time. She was not only attending, she had been written into the show itself, added to the production at the last minute by a network that wanted her in the room. For someone who grew up watching the BET Awards packed into a family room with her mother, aunties, and siblings, rating the performances and the outfits together, the distance between that couch and the green room at the Shrine Auditorium had collapsed almost faster than she could process it.
Stylelist Matthew and his partner Reggie were already waiting at the Ritz with a rack that read like a shipping manifest from three continents: three Cavalli pieces fresh out of the box, a Do Long gown that had traveled from Vietnam, Dsquared with a full jewelry component, an Area look described as fresh off the runway, and a custom yellow dress that Matthew had reconstructed entirely and finished in 24 hours. The fitting took most of the afternoon. A long colorful beaded gown required three people pulling simultaneously just to clear her hips, which produced a sustained moment of shouting and laughter that the whole room felt. A dramatic floor-length option got unanimous praise and an equally unanimous verdict: beautiful, different event.
The yellow dress nobody had tried before
The custom piece was the one Carthen had already decided on before she finished buttoning anything else. A vibrant yellow she had never worn on a carpet, it had been reworked from a heavier strap to a thinner one for cohesion, and it carried what she described as the same family feeling as her Vanity Fair look: hot, sexy, intentional. The carpet look was a Balenciaga piece that arrived with an internal bra frame built to hold the weight of the dress so it would not shift. Matthew had strong opinions about one accessory addition and lost the argument cleanly. The final call: black pumps, bangles, big hair, no necklace, clip-on earrings taped at the back to stay in place on the carpet, and a gold belly ring they still needed to find somewhere in LA before sunset.
In the car filming a Hyundai partnership segment that afternoon, with her garment bag secured in back and a small tablet screen Luciano had rigged so she could monitor her own framing through the windshield, Carthen paused the shoot to say something that had clearly been building all day. ‘When I have a big moment,’ she told the camera, ‘they want to build on that moment to give me an even bigger moment.’ She was talking about a team that showed up on a Saturday in Los Angeles because they chose to, not because they had to.
Walking in late was the plan
The morning of the show started at six a.m. with hair stylist Ricky setting up in the adjacent JW Marriott room while makeup followed at eight and nails arrived in between. The schedule was tight from the first hour. Rehearsals at the venue pulled her out of the glam chair early, which sent her manager Julia into what Carthen cheerfully described as a productive stress spiral. At the venue she found her name on a seat placard, spotted Wale one row ahead, texted Kehlani back, waved at Teyana Taylor across the room, and learned she would be walking in fashionably late by design, sitting briefly in Kehlani’s seat as part of the bit. The yellow dress drew immediate heat on the carpet. The Balenciaga look followed for the show itself, and the shoes came off minutes before she walked out, replaced by a pair borrowed from a colleague whose feet were noticeably smaller.
She was on the live camera. The room was full. It was exactly what she had watched from a couch her entire childhood.
Matthew, still sweating in the tent
In the quick-change tent after the carpet, Matthew was reportedly refusing water.
By 7:25 the next morning, Carthen was in a car to the airport, her flight departing at nine, her eyes half-open, recalling blindly eating McDonald’s fries in an Uber sometime after the after-party. She is getting braids at six a.m. the following day. First BET Awards: ten out of ten.
