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Meet the Artist Who Painted That Amazing Timothée Chalamet Oscars Shirt

'Call Me by Your Name' screenwriter James Ivory rocked the red carpet in the hand-painted button-down created by Andrew Mania.
Photos courtesy of Andrew Mania.

Call Me By Your Name took home a single Oscar at the Academy Awards Sunday night for James Ivory’s Best Adapted Screenplay—but the 89-year-old should have also won an award for being the best dressed guy on the red carpet, thanks to his DIY dress shirt featuring Timothée Chalamet's mug.

It turns out that the mastermind behind the shirt is Bristol-based artist Andrew Mania, who took to his own Instagram to tout his viral creation.

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Beautiful boys are a theme in Mania's paintings, which draw heavily from the same kind of "impossibly curved" Greek statues peppered throughout Call Me by Your Name. A press release for Mania's recent group show at the Peter von Kant Gallery describes his works as focusing on "the love-sick teenager obsessively archiving his latest crushes." According to von Kant, Mania’s work can be found at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London and Elton John's private collection.

VICE spoke to the artist, who explained that he "started painting on shirts after seeing the film."

"The film is so beautiful and I really wanted that shirt with faces in the final scene so much that I decided to paint my own after having no luck finding it online," Mania told VICE. "Which in turn led to painting one of Elio, too."

It's a match made in thematic heaven for Luca Guadagnino's film based on the novel by André Aciman, but how did Mania’s work wind up on a shirt at Hollywood’s biggest red carpet event?

"[Art curator Xavier Salomon] sent James a photo of my shirt and he responded quickly saying he wanted one!" Mania said. "I was secretly imagining him wearing it to the Oscars, and then the next day he messaged to say he wanted one made for the Oscars if he got nominated!"

"Seeing him win was quite emotional, I've been a huge fan of his films since [I was] a teenager and seeing a Room with a View," Mania said of watching Ivory accept the award for Best Adapted Screenplay. "I did shed tears of elation. His speech was so beautiful."

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Ivory thanked Aciman, Guadagnino, and his late domestic partner and longtime collaborator Ismail Merchant, who produced Room with a View, in the speech. "I wouldn’t be standing up here without the inspired help I received from my life's partners, who are gone," he said.

Anyone looking to cop Ivory's style can commission their own by getting in contact with Mania directly on Instagram. The artist told VICE that he's already had "lots of interest" in them and is still working out the price, but plans to start making T-shirts and screenprints of his famous design.

And, luckily for all of us, Guadagnino announced on the red carpet Sunday that a sequel to the Oscar-nominated film is in the works, so Mania will likely have an entirely new movie to cull artistic inspiration from. Because you can never really have too many shirts featuring Timothée Chalamet's face, right?

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