HOLLYWOOD GLAMOUR ON DISPLAY
Clothes make the movie star. To be an actor, you need talent, sensitivity and a special kind of courage. To be an icon, you need style.
You also need to know how to work that red carpet.
Dijanna Mulhearn’s “Red Carpet Oscars” shows us, in exhaustive, extravagant detail, all the actresses and, occasionally, actors who have. Gigantic and gorgeously illustrated, it covers Hollywood glamour through the years.
This includes a few infamous moments of: What were they thinking? Do they own a mirror?
Although hard to imagine now, the Oscars began low-key. Movie mogul Louis B. Mayer dreamed up the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in 1927 as a public relations move. He also hoped a studio-sponsored organization might distract Hollywood workers from forming unions.
Spoiler alert: It didn’t.
The annual awards were almost an after-thought, beginning as a small dinner in 1929. Movie sweetheart Janet Gaynor accepted the inaugural Best Actress prize — awarded to her for multiple films — wearing a blouse with a Peter Pan collar and a kneelength, thrift-store skirt.
“Those early years saw rising stars simply wear what they had,” Mulhearn notes.
Then, a self-conscious stuffiness prevailed, with some attendees embracing a more formal look. Helen Hayes accepted her Best Actress award in 1932 wearing white opera gloves and a large corsage pinned to her dress.
As the awards’ fame grew, so did the flash. Studio designers like Adrian Greenburg — famous by his first name alone — were assigned to whip up stylish gowns. What the stars wore to the gala — or didn’t — soon became stories in themselves.
Bette Davis was so insulted at getting only a write-in nomination for “Of Human Bondage” that when she received the award the next year for “Dangerous,” she attended the 1936 ceremony in a drab costume from her film “Housewife.” Since the moguls didn’t respect her, she said it felt appropriate to sport “something the hired help” would wear. Her outfit got people talking and served notice that this actress would not be ignored.
A decade later, Davis’ lifelong nemesis Joan Crawford stole the show by not going at all. She was so convinced she wouldn’t win for “Mildred Pierce” she stayed home, pleading illness. When she ended up winning, the film’s director delivered the statue to her bedroom, photographers in tow. The quickly recovered star “accepted the Oscar luxuriously attired in a Parisian peignoir set of lace-trimmed silk satin nightdress, sheer lace-trimmed scarf and a billowing chiffon robe,” Mulhearn writes.
The first televised Oscars arrived in 1953, and the first red carpet was unfurled eight years later. No one has looked back since.
“Audiences couldn’t get enough,” Mulhearn writes. “Optimism and affluence were demonstrated by the sheer volume of each dress and space they demanded. … Strapless gowns perched perilously on gravity-defying bosoms held aloft by awe-inspiring feats of internal engineering, while flowing skirts ballooned into broad pedestals beneath.”
The combination of voluptuous stars and live television posed a problem. The industry’s solution was to put formidable Oscar-winning costume designer Edith Head in charge.
“To ensure that all the gowns were Oscar-worthy and complied with television censors, the Academy assigned Head as the ceremony’s own fashion police,” Mulhearn writes. “Backstage, she and her team had a stash of silk roses, shawls, velvet wraparound skirts and cleavage covers to drape across immodest stars.”
Some stars didn’t need the guidance, like the always classy Audrey Hepburn, invariably dressed by Givenchy.
Striding onstage in 1954, her “deceptively simple lace organdy dress combined the feminine with the modern, the doe-eyed debutante with the rising regal ingenue,” Mulhearn writes. One added benefit: The flowing skirt hid the big feet Hepburn was so self-conscious about.
Other stars couldn’t be contained, like Elizabeth Taylor, an annual paparazzifriendly, cleavage-baring sensation. In 1960, mocking her home-wrecker reputation for winning Eddie Fisher from Debbie Reynolds, she wore virginal white. Ten years later, with Richard Burton on her arm and a 68-carat diamond around her neck, she switched to pale blue, chosen to match Burton’s startling eyes.
Taylor’s choices always made a statement, and as the times changed, so did the messages stars wanted to send.
The ’60s promised new freedoms, and while real change took a while, fashion
led the charge. In 1966, Julie Christie, a symbol of swinging London, ignored the obligatory gowns and wore a pants suit. Time magazine called her more influential than “the 10-best dressed women combined.” She topped that the next year, when she slipped past the backstage censors and picked up her Oscar for “Darling” wearing a minidress.
“Oh my God,” an appalled Edith Head exclaimed.
The revolution had arrived, at least onstage. In 1969, “Funny Girl” winner Barbra Streisand wore strategically transparent “party pajamas”; in 1971, Sally Kellerman, a Best Actress nominee for “M*A*S*H” wore a bugle-bead gown with a plunging V-neck. “She may not have won the Oscar,” Mulhearn writes, “but her outfit ensured she was the hot topic on everyone’s lips.”
Few stars ever gained more attention on the red carpet than Cher, who, working with Bob Mackie, slid into gowns that looked more like costumes. None grabbed more stares than her 1986 outfit, which included a feathered headdress, jet crystals and just enough velvet, Lycra, satin and cashmere to keep the censors at bay.
“Too much?” Mackie worried at one point. Not at all, countered Cher. She wanted a dress that made her “impossible to ignore.” It did.
Also impossible to ignore: the singer Bjork, who sported the swan dress in 2001 — which came complete with an egg the performer dropped on the carpet. Granted, this was absurd, as far as gowns go, but it was memorable.
As always, some celebrities pushed back against rituals, using their clothes to make political points.
Robert De Niro may have begun the trend in 1981 when he wore a small green ribbon in his lapel to memorialize the ongoing child murders in Atlanta. Soon other bits of colored fabric began appearing, each linked to a cause. Outraged at the lack of female nominees for director, Natalie Portman went even further in 2020 and had the names of eight snubbed women filmmakers embroidered on her Dior cape.
Still, it comes down to celebrities, their clothes and designers, as the red carpet has become America’s fashion runway. The days when skilled seamstresses like Joanne Woodward would buy $100 worth of green taffeta and whip up their own homemade gowns were gone. These became the nights of Valentino, Armani, and Chanel.
Everyone wanted to dress the top stars, knowing the fame would rub off on them. The hashtag might have been AngiesRightLeg, but the picture the Twitterati was raving over in 2012 was of Angelina Jolie’s long limb peeking out of a deeply slit gown from Atelier Versace.
Occasionally, the stars would push back, going vintage or off-the-rack (like Sharon Stone’s Gap T-shirt) or proudly bragging they were recycling an expensive gown worn before. Clothes distract from causes, they insist, which is why there was briefly a move to query stars on serious issues, too. AskHerMore became the activist hashtag, and it gained some traction.
But very soon, the old question returned and will probably safely remain forever: “Who are you wearing?”