And the Award for Best Dress Goes To...
Wherein I Recall Some of the Highs & Lows of My Former Life as a Red Carpet Critic
This Sunday wraps up what has been the longest, most dense awards show season in recent memory. And for someone like me who loves a red carpet, the prime time hours of most Sunday nights over the last two months have seemed like Christmas morning on repeat.
While I am sure I watched the Oscars growing up, I didn’t become deeply invested in them and their sparkling corollaries until I was in my late twenties, writing about fashion for the New York Post. Part of that gig included reviewing the looks on the carpets at all of the big awards shows. While I love a spectacle, I detest a crowd. So I’d do this by watching the show and the preceding E! style coverage on TV.
The Post covered awards season ravenously, publishing predictions and industry gossip (its bread and butter) before the shows, and dropping multiple-page spreads detailing every aspect of the broadcast the day after. Fashion was a big part of it. Back when I was “doing carpets,” I covered the Oscars, Grammys, Emmys, Golden Globes, and occasionally the MTV or VHI Music Awards, which both took place in NYC. I’d do the Super Bowl, too, if someone sexy was playing the half-time show.
Fun aside: I was on the clock when the Timberlake-Jackson “Nipplegate” situation happened. Since there was no instant playback then, I called my friend Laura Brown, who I knew was watching, to make sure that I wasn’t seeing things. Yep, she confirmed. That really happened. Of course, in predictable tabloid style, the Post ran the story on its front page the next day. Fashion week started a few days after the Bowl that year, and people were still talking about the slip-up (nip-up?) at the shows. I remember my friend and frequent fashion show seat-mate, the great Pulitzer-winning fashion critic Robin Givhan, sharing that she’d spent the past few days researching nipple rings for the Washington Post. Sex sells, no matter how polite your publication is.
I did live-cover one carpet: the Grammys, in the late ‘90s, one of the years they held them in NYC. Being in that rabid throng must have traumatized me enough that the only thing I remember about that night has nothing to do with clothes; it was smoking cigarettes in the men’s shoe department at Barneys at an afterparty. Believe it or not, this was not an anomaly: they actually let you smoke at store parties back then. (I went to a thing at Henri Bendel once where someone passed a lit joint around in the designer dress department and no one said a word. Not kidding. The ’90s were so weird and permissive.)
Even the two times in the early aughts when I did go to LA to cover the Oscar scene (random memory: one of those years, I also produced a photo shoot at the Mondrian that featured Harvey Weinstein and Philip Glass; long story,) I didn’t go to any of the watch parties I was invited to. Nor did I stand outside the Dolby Theater and shout, “WHAT ARE YOU WEARING, UMA?!” while getting my toes stepped on by the foaming-at-the-mouth party reporters who had the inauspicious job of doing that on repeat throughout the season.
The Post usually gave me at least four pages for my awards coverage — more if someone pulled a Bjork and rolled up in a swan dress, as she did at the 2001 Oscars. Julia Roberts won best actress, but Iceland’s finest manic-pixie-dream girl made our cover that year.
Of course, this was before social media, or really any as-it-happens online awards show coverage (I worked at the Post from 1997 until 2004; I had left by the time they got serious about digital). Today, if someone rolled up to the American Music Awards in matching Canadian tuxedos, like Justin Timberlake and Britney Spears did in 2001, it’d become an instant meme, seen by millions of people in a blink. This kind of quick-turn exposure has made the ta-da!, day-after coverage I used to write anti-climactic at best, irrelevant at worst.
I’m assuming that this is what makes these recollections interesting (if indeed they are). My experience is rooted in another era, a time before citizen journalism muted the power of the press and made us all reporters. I still read post-show coverage in the Times (love Vanessa Friedman), Business of Fashion and Vogue because they inevitably get into the bitchy minutiae of red carpet palace intrigue, which I love. But the truth is, Instagram has neutered the once sacred cows of fashion criticism, making their point of view a lot less illuminating to most readers than it was even ten years ago. In 2024, everyone's a critic.
On award show days, I had a fairly regimented schedule. The big ones usually fell on Sundays, so after brunch and church (and by that I mean a trip to the old Chelsea Flea Market, RIP), I’d head up to the Post offices in Rock Center to see if any relevant faxes had come in for me over the weekend (again, this was a long time ago).
I was always looking for advance intel about the looks that would be coming down the carpet — sometimes I called stylists to see what they could tell me, if they weren’t under a gag order; NDAs are common — anything to keep me from relying on the fashion reporting skills of Ryan Seacrest and his merry band of over-tanned style reporters. For many years, their live reporting was the only way to confirm which star was wearing what dress. During the pre-show, it always felt like my fate was in the reporters’ hands, as I waited to hear the golden question: “Who are you wearing?” If someone in the Seacrest crew forgot to ask Renee Zellweger which fashion house (the “who”) made her dress, I was SOL until someone from the brand could confirm the next AM.
Since stars’ red carpet looks are often highly guarded until they step out of their cars, the effort I made to extract faxes was largely ceremonial. Usually, the ones that had piped in never amounted to much — just written confirmations from a few jewelry and accessory companies (hello, Swarovski and Stuart Weitzman! Those guys were always early birds). There would also inevitably be a few releases from the publicists of not-quite-A-list celebs, who usually didn’t have access to the same caliber of designer fashion as the A’s and were therefore not as bound by secrecy.
Of course, it was the A-list info I was looking for. But Armani, Prada, Dior, Chanel and the other big guys that were favorites of the shiniest stars provided little support in this area. But who can fault them; people are fickle, and can change their minds and therefore their dresses at the last minute. It’s risky for brands to circulate what might end up being erroneous information before the fact.
Yes, people take this shit very seriously. And for good reason: there’s a lot of money on the line. I remember one year in the early aughts, learning that the ad equivalent of a status actor like Nicole Kidman wearing, say, a Dior dress on the carpet could be as high as $12 million. (In today’s dollars, that number seems low. But considering the falling viewership of pretty much every big showcase event now, not to mention the state of the publishing industry, it might still be accurate.) The exposure that these Hollywood fashion shows give brands is incredibly valuable.
There’s a trickle-down economics theory that applies here, too, rooted in consumer psychology, which I totally geek out on. While there’s only a miniscule chance that us plebes watching the red carpet from the cheap seats (read: anywhere not at the Dolby Theatre or the Vanity Fair watching party at Mortons) could actually buy the Chanel Haute Couture gown Margot Robbie’s wearing tomorrow night (guessing here), there’s a much higher chance that we’ll pony up for one of the brand’s coveted bags (less expensive only in comparison), or even more likely its cosmetics. Couture in general has an international client list that numbers only in the low four figures. Conventional fashion world wisdom is that the only reason couture houses can still justify their existence is that the visuals from their fashion shows sell lipstick, allowing those of us in the 99% to align with a luxury brand without dipping into our 401K. We may not be able to buy Margot’s five-figure white column gown from 2018, but Chanel’s $52 blush is another story.
I’m not a fast writer, and the timing on award show nights was always tight. I had to be on my game in order to file stories twice. The first story was due before 8 PM, which means I was doing a lot of projecting, as the carpet had just started getting hot (this is where those shoe and jewelry faxes were valuable: filling space). The second deadline was at 10, when my big review would be sent to print, along with the attendant “best-of” photos I’d requested. At least that was the hope.
On Sunday nights, I didn’t have my regular copy editors and designer to lay out my pages; the news guys — who I really liked, but who could give two shits about clothes — were calling the shots. Subtly was not their strong suit, and often, despite my asking for specific looks to be used in the photo layout, the night editor would often end up going with his (always his) gut. And of course, his gut gravitated toward the women wearing the least, no matter the provenance of their dress or ability of the wearer to resonate with readers. Again, sex sells.
Occasionally, after my coverage had run, I’d get calls from fashion houses, thanking me for saying something nice about their client’s look or simply including them in my coverage. Sometimes, they’d send flowers (so many lilies!) or a handwritten note, which was kind. It was good to know people were paying attention.
Of course, even if I had a reputation for being nice and fair (and I did), the Post did not. Harsh criticism and controversy are very welcome there, if not encouraged. Some of my colleagues could be brutal. But harsh public condemnation goes against my constitution. I was never good at being bitchy; fair and honest, yes. But it’s just not in my nature to slag for slagging’s sake.
Not to say I didn’t give bad reviews. I did. But I always tried to be constructive. On the rare occasions when I was overly critical and maybe a little bit snotty about a star’s look, I’d usually hear about it from their agent, manager or another member of their entourage. I still cringe when I think of the scolding I got from a stylist for making a young Sopranos actress cry with something I wrote about an overly infantile look she wore to a premiere. Seriously — my tummy hurts, right now.
Here’s the deal. No one sets out to look bad on Oscar night. Unless they’re trying to make some kind of statement, I’d venture to say that everyone who understands the game, and recognizes that they’ll be up against the scrutiny of critics and armchair experts, does their best to look amazing. So to call out someone publicly for dubious personal taste or falling victim to a bad alternation seems incredibly cruel. We all make mistakes.
Except Cate Blanchett. She’s perfect.
ETC.
My favorite part of our Oscar coverage didn’t have anything to do with show night. Every year, the day after the awards, I’d put in a call to Allen Schwartz, formerly of the fashion brand abs. He’s the dude who first had the brilliant idea to design facsimiles of the best Oscar looks on the fly and rush them into production, just in time for prom season. Allen and I would compare best-of notes and then I’d quiz him on what he was making and why. I loved it when we synched. And I still love the idea of high school dancing queens across the nation walking into their school gyms wearing a $200 version of the chartreuse bias-cut couture gown by Dior (see it in the main story) that Nicole Kidman wore to the Oscars in 1997, courtesy of Allen.
I have another red carpet memory that’s not directly connected to awards shows, but that’s still fun to recall. Several times in the early aughts, I spoke to the late pop fashion critic Mr. Blackwell, the proprietor of the annual “Ten Worst Dressed List.” In early 2001, he named Courtney Love to his selection of walking fashion raspberries. This was just after she had gone through her movie star phase, taking her look from grunge goddess to sleek sylph, and I was hopeful that she could keep it up. Mr. Blackwell, less so. He dinged her for transgressions that included wearing a shredded black “trash bag” dress from the John Galliano’s controversial 2001 SS collection for Dior, which was widely derided for his tone-deaf glamourization of the clothes worn by unhoused people.
"When push comes to shove, no one's fashion is tackier and wackier than funky, punky Love,” he wrote. (I had forgotten that he rhymed!) Mr. Blackwell thought Courtney’s style was a temporary front, and that she was destined to revert to her early ‘90s kinderwhore ways. I had (and have) more faith that she could continue to keep up appearances.
God bless you, Mr. Blackwell, but I think I won this bet.