Fashion on the Red Carpet

Abstract

The Academy Awards’ red-carpet is the most prominent fashion show in media culture. This book investigates the historical liaison between Hollywood and fashion institutions to describe how public relations campaigns and the media articulated fashion discourses around the Oscars throughout history. It argues that the fashion industry’s business model of celebrity endorsement and renowned designers as branded labels is based on the triangulation done by Hollywood studios, department stores, and American garment manufacturers during the interwar era. Departing from archival sources, and tracing discourses of fashion, stardom, and celebrity around Hollywood and the Oscars, this study unravels this phenomenon’s cultural, political and economic impact, explaining how the Academy Awards’ red-carpet became a marquee for the global endorsement of high-end fashion brands. The book addresses globalisation as a central topic to frame the red-carpet phenomenon, linking the fashion and media industries throughout the 20th Century. It points at the postwar as a historical turning point that consolidated the position of the United States as a veritable behemoth exporter of popular culture, depicting the American lifestyle as synonymous with wealth and comfort to further the global expansion of consumer culture. The book identifies power shift towards television, the emergence of celebrity culture, the post-war reactivation of transatlantic trade, the growth of fashion journalism, and the increasing circulation of designer names in the media as a series of converging factors that led to the institutionalisation of the red-carpet parade as a fashion event in its own right.