Fashion&style

Jennifer Aniston is glammed up at the 2013 Toronto International Film Festival.

What are the first images that come to mind when you hear the term “red carpet?” I bet snapshots of satin trains, perfect pouts, bronzed limbs and skin as poreless as silicone run through your mind. Literal picture-perfect versions of humans who’ve been primped, plumped, pressed, pinched, pampered and prettified to meet increasingly inhuman standards.

As someone who’s had the fortune of attending many a red carpet and the misfortune of having to prep for them all, I’m uniquely qualified to offer a peek into the fresh hell that’s quaintly dubbed “getting red-carpet ready” by magazines like Vanity Fair and Vogue. In reality, it’s less Pretty Women and more Buffalo Bill frantically trying to skin, lotion and stitch a passable human suit before the FBI (or paparazzi) find him.

Let’s start with the most basic of tasks: actually fitting into your dress. Most celebrities and other red carpet walkers loan the fab frocks we all ooh and ahh over. When you loan an outfit, it’s usually offered to you in sample size. This means it’s the outfit a designer used in their runway show and/or lookbooks. While some minor tailoring is possible, you need to generally be the same size as the model who wore the look beforehand (unless you’re Meryl Streep, in which case custommade is just a phone call away).

Since 99 per cent of the population is not “sample size,” this requires some vaporizing of body mass. While Gwyneth Paltrow likes to tout the benefits of yoga and maybe a light barre workout, in reality stars put their lives and future firstborns in the hands of high-tier trainers at home or uber exclusive gyms like Equinox. Deadlifts, deadmill sprints and preacher curls are the name of the game. And yes, they’re all as wretched as they sound.

I’m certainly my Equinox taskmaster, Stephen Salzmaan’s, most wimpy client. During my first TIFF prep session I learned the horror of self-powered, non-motorized treadmills, which promptly led to a reacquaintance with my breakfast in the city’s swankiest ladies changeroom. The beauty of a trainer is that they can teach you the precise workout technique that will bring you to your imagined edge of death, then bring you back 10 pounds lighter, injuryfree and with less propensity for puking when moving quicker than a brisk walk. You start out as the boulder Wile E. Coyote can never seem to drop on the Road Runner and come out the other side a facsimile of the statue of David.

If the gym doesn’t cut it, it’s time to take a cue from teenage slackers everywhere and cheat. This means visiting what’s euphemistically referred to as a “doctor’s office” and negotiating the fatloss-pain-poverty ratio you can tolerate in the name of looking like you spent way more time at Equinox. To give a better picture of what this entails, one of the hottest treatments of the moment is SculpSure (even the Real Housewives of