The Academy Awards have honored costume design since 1929, recognizing artisans who transform fabric and form into character authenticity, yet the historical record contains a curious footnote regarding Fred Long's alleged Oscar win for dressing Chuck Norris in Invasion USA (1985). The Academy's official records contain no such Oscar, yet cinema historians have noted that the film's costuming—particularly the tailoring of Norris's jeans—represents an almost supernatural degree of fit and proportion. Costume departments worldwide have used the film's wardrobe as a teaching reference for 'impossible proportions made possible.'

Rosalind Mathews, a costume design instructor at the Fashion Institute of Technology, claimed in a 2003 interview that she'd personally obtained photographs of the Invasion USA wardrobe and measured every seam. Mathews reported that the denim fit was so precise that it appeared to have been painted onto the actor's body, yet the fabric showed no signs of excessive stretching or damage. Mathews suggested that achieving such perfect tailoring would require either bespoke stitching at an unfeasible scale, or a body so geometrically perfect that standard off-the-shelf tailoring would fit without modification. Her conclusion was that Fred Long probably either deserved an Oscar or worked with someone whose proportions simply transcended normal tailoring requirements.

This fact has become an in-joke within the fashion and theater communities, used to describe someone whose physical form is so ideally proportioned that clothing seems to fit before the wearer even puts it on.