RED CARPET CHRONICLES
Montreal’s J.S. Group reaches for the stars with its premier dress line, Theia. With the Carrie Underwood Grammy coup, it is hoping for Oscar exposure
As millions of people sit down to watch the fashion spectator sport of the Oscar red carpet Sunday night, more than a few Montrealers will be watching with bated breath. Among them: owners of J.S. Group International and their team — including the New York designer who created the jaw-dropping video-enhanced Theia gown for Carrie Underwood at the Grammys.
Don O’Neill, creative director of Theia, is working with four actresses for the Academy Awards, but has no idea if even one gown will make it to the red carpet. Naturally, he can’t reveal any names.
“It’s like playing Russian roulette. You just wait like the rest of the world,” O’Neill said.
“I’ve gone beyond hoping. In the beginning, it was heartbreaking because you think you are dressing someone and then they get out of the car and they’re wearing a totally different dress.”
Stylists pull dozens of dresses, and the celebrity and team narrow it down to four or five, perhaps three of which are altered to fit properly, he explained. “And the night of the gala, they will pick the dress they feel best in.”
Even Michelle Obama had a choice of 15 designers waiting and watching the inauguration, he said.
But with the Underwood coup, the Theia label has resonated, doubling hits on the company’s website, sparking huge media coverage, and raising high hopes for O’Neill and the Hops family, owners of J.S. Group, a Montreal dress company dating to the 1970s. It has grown to four divisions with 3,000 points of sale in 40 countries.
Andrew Hops, vice-president of the company and merchandising manager for all divisions, will be watching the Oscars with his camera — “I usually take photos of the TV,” he admitted.
Obviously, all four designers watch, too, and they speak that night after the awards or first thing the next morning.
“It’s more the inspiration — we don’t copy the dresses any more,” Hops said.
If there are plunging necklines on the awards shows, we make sure we have plunging necklines in the line, for instance, Hops said.
J.S. Group did a Kate Middleton wedding dress copy — because it was asked to by Access Hollywood, Hops recalled.
“We’ve told them we don’t want to do it any more,” he said. “It takes us away from what we really want to do, which is designing and coming up with our own concept. We have four very talented designers. I don’t want to be known as a copy house.”
Still, watching the red carpet is de rigueur and exciting for those in the evening dress business.
“It gets your fire going,” Hops said. “It’s what everybody is talking about.”
Hops and O’Neill were on the same wavelength about the Grammys and Golden Globes hits: Rihanna’s red Azzedine Alaïa gown was a stunner. “In the entire awards season, there wasn’t a dress that was as simple, effortless, weightless, stunning — he’s a master,” O’Neill said of Alaïa.
At the Globes, it was Kate Hudson in black and gold Alexander McQueen.
Hops was not impressed with J. Lo, on the other hand, with a leg posed à la Angelina Jolie in an asymmetric black dress by Anthony Vaccarello.
“Theia always has dresses with slits. It’s more of a tasteful slit,” Hops said, adding there’s nothing wrong with a high slit — it was the posed leg that was problematic.
O’Neill’s designer eye is always observing.
“All red carpets are a wonderful showcase for evening wear. You have the drama of allowing a woman to have a beautiful long train on a dress or very deep décolletage,” he said.
He has no favourite style: “It isn’t the dress, it’s the woman,” he said, allowing that he favours a train on the red carpet because it elongates the body.
O’Neill had wanted to dress Underwood for the red carpet rather than her performance — that normally gets all the attention, he said.
The idea of the fusion of technology and couture came from Underwood’s creative team, he said. Digital images of roses, butterflies, swirls and galaxies were projected on the gown, of platinum duchesse satin with tulle underskirt and Swarovski beading under the bodice.
The dress by itself had to be beautiful and unique so when she came onstage to perform she would look stunning all by herself, standing in the middle of the big stage with no lights projected on her, he said.
“She took a huge risk. She did something simple that became phenomenal,” O’Neill said.
“Anything could have gone wrong — there could have been a computer glitch.”
O’Neill has dressed Underwood several times, as well as Oprah at the Oscars last year, Taylor Swift, Angela Bassett and Emmy Rossum.
On the subject of red carpet risks, O’Neill suggests that many actresses are too afraid of Joan Rivers and her fashion police to make a fashion statement. Their future careers and makeup and perfume contracts depend on the impression they make.
“They want a very glamorous statement, but they want to keep it simple. They want to make an impression, but they don’t want to look silly. They don’t want someone from some part of the world that is not very sophisticated saying, ‘What the hell was she wearing?’ ”
It’s a bit disappointing, he notes, when each season brings tens of thousands of red carpet dresses from the runways and couture shows around the world, so many of them extraordinary.
“And then you go to the Oscars, and you see 50 women in evening dresses, and you see very little of what you thought were the most amazing red carpet dresses that the fashion industry produced.
“It’s kind of interesting to see how it just becomes a strapless mermaid gown when you saw the most breathtaking, jaw-dropping Alexander McQueen confection. “People are afraid to wear them.” He admires those who have a unique sense of style and express it. “They’re like, ‘I don’t care what people think, this is amazing and I am wearing it.’ “And bravo to them.” The fascination with the red carpet and the media feeding frenzy are all about the glamour and the fantasy of glamour, said O’Neill, originally from Ireland. He landed in New York in 1993 after winning a U.S. green card lottery. Working with Christian Lacroix in Paris at the time, he consulted the couturier’s astrologer — on the suggestion of Lacroix — who told him his future was in New York.
“It’s snowballed a bit out of control,” he said, describing the scene in which the celebrities walk down the red carpet, “stopping every four feet in front of a new bank of photographers, and everybody wants a piece of every star and the stars are turning it on with their makeup and their hair, and making sure they’ve eaten nothing for eight days before the event.
“Most mere mortals — you don’t get to walk a red carpet,” he said.
There’s the fantasy of walking the red carpet, primped by a team of hair and makeup artists “making you look beyond exceptionally ravishing.”
“What woman doesn’t want that?”
The whole philosophy behind Theia, the Greek goddess of light, he said, is giving every woman the opportunity to have that red carpet moment.
“We’re all about making a woman feel like a goddess. As far I am concerned, we transcend and go beyond the red carpet.”