For someone with a song called “Golden,” Audrey Nuna has avoided the color all awards season long—that is, until the 2026 Oscars rolled around.
The singer, who lends her voice to Mira in KPop Demon Hunters, has dominated the red carpet recently, wearing everything from a bow-laden Thom Browne gown with a dramatic netted veil to a doll-like Marc Jacobs dress. Though shy as a kid, fashion has always served as “a vessel of complete freedom” for Nuna.
“Maybe I don’t feel comfortable socializing with the person next to me in school, or I don’t feel the most comfortable in my skin,” she says. “But when it came to clothes, I always had this gift of feeling so free to do whatever I wanted.”
The Academy Awards presented the ultimate opportunity to do just that. “It’s such an incredible platform to be able to fully express yourself and be like, ‘This is me, and this is what I want to do,’” Nuna says. Eager to end the season on a sartorial high, she and her stylist, Danyul Brown, returned to Thom Browne, who has fashioned her many a custom look over the last few months.
Coming as she does from a family of garment industry workers, for Nuna, wearing a custom piece by Browne feels practically cosmic. “Thom Browne was one of the first orders that my grandpa fulfilled when he was making his living,” she says. “[It’s] one of the ones that I remember most vividly growing up.”
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Browne himself couldn’t help but be drawn into Nuna’s obit. “Audrey is such a special person, such a special talent, having such a special moment,” Browne tells Vogue. “I have focused on her true individuality and her connection with being true to herself through everything she does.”
Through a “frictionless experience,” as Nuna describes it, they landed on a fitted black high-neck jacket dripping in gold beads, paired with a voluminous black drop-waist skirt with a moiré overlay. Nuna was partial to the look’s duality—the push and pull of the austere, structured jacket and the free, feminine skirt. “I feel so seen by [it],” she says.
But it’s the gold that Nuna’s been waiting all season for. “There were conversations about doing it sooner, but it just made most sense to finish on this high,” Brown, her stylist, says. Nuna and her bandmates, Rei Ami and Ejae, agreed to save it for the Oscars, where they’ll perform “Golden,” a nominee for best original song. As Nuna puts it: “To do gold felt like the sacred thing that we wanted to do at the culmination, so we really held off on that.”