Welcome to The American Thread, a recurring column on the fate and future of fashion in the US, written by Vogue Business editor-at-large Christina Binkley. To receive the Vogue Business newsletter, sign up here.
The Oscars will take place on Sunday, but Hollywood Boulevard has been blockaded for a week now to lay the red carpet that Valentino, Dior, Tiffany, Prada and other luxury labels will traverse that evening. The calendar of Oscar-week parties began in earnest Thursday night with a Louis Vuitton fête. Saturday night belongs to Chanel at the Polo Lounge. Armani, Prada, Versace, Saint Laurent and even Philipp Plein are hosting events leading up to the big evening.
Then come the afterparties. Armand de Brignac, an alcohol label owned by LVMH, will host a coveted-invite shindig with Jay-Z at Chateau Marmont. Gucci will host a competing private party with Madonna and Guy Oseary. I’m sure I’m missing some.
Over the past few years, European luxury conglomerates have subsumed the Academy Awards. It started with jewellery and watch contracts, and stars began to angle the baubles they wore towards the cameras. Contracts for brand ambassadors came to include clauses requiring them to wear the label at the Oscars among other events. These days, talent agents who once focused on blockbuster movie deals are fussing over cosmetics brands’ contractual clauses for afterparties. It would be a likely breach of contract if Dior beauty ambassador Anya Taylor-Joy doesn’t appear in a Dior gown on Sunday.
Award-winning thespians’ bodies are divvied up between fashion and beauty conglomerates. At last year’s Vanity Fair afterparty, Riley Keough’s ears went to Boucheron; her body to Celine encased in a glimmering gown; and her face went to YSL Beauty, according to a person familiar with the contract for the actress and Elvis Presley’s granddaughter. She was a Kering-LVMH trifecta.
“I feel like brands have come over and taken over Oscars week,” says Keith Baptista, co-founder of creative agency Prodject, when I asked him what’s new with the Oscars lately. Baptista wasn’t complaining. He works regularly with Chanel, Gucci and other clients, including on Oscars-week events. Sunday’s Vanity Fair afterparty remains popular with celebrities, he says matter-of-factly, because “it’s the only place that night where you can get your picture taken if you’re not a nominee”.
Only a handful of celebrities are getting rich this way. A multi-year Dior contract can be worth seven figures, but with most labels, the payment is closer to $250,000 per year, according to an agent I spoke with. Still, many young stars now expect to be paid to wear designer looks, the agent says, and are disappointed to learn that only about three in 10 actually have paid contracts. But that’s enough to have set expectations that everyone should get a paid contract. It’s getting harder, a stylist told me, to convince these celebrities to do things the old-fashioned way — to borrow a gown or tuxedo and return it.
As a result of all this dealmaking, we’re not seeing many indie fashion brands worn at the Oscars anymore. Last year, LVMH brands dominated the red carpet, with multiple looks from Fendi, Tiffany, Berluti, Louis Vuitton, Givenchy and Dior Couture. Kering and its privately held sister company Artémis had at least four brands on the carpet. American labels were sorely lacking, though Tom Ford, Tory Burch, David Yurman and a few others got in a lick.
My archive of press releases and searches of coverage for the last two years’ Academy Awards wasn’t encyclopaedic, but I found only two gowns appearing on the red carpet from an indie designer without a big company backing them. Both were worn by actress Jessie Buckley. Designer Erdem Moralıoğlu, via his Erdem label, dressed Buckley in a stunning tea rose satin gown with a swirling train when she was nominated for Best Supporting Actress in 2022. She wore a black lace Rodarte number in 2023.
Oscars viewership, though, has been having a rough go. Just under 19 million people watched last year, a drop of more than half from the 40 million who watched in 2014. By comparison, 123 million people watched American football’s championship game this year, up from 111 million in 2014. Brands should do a red carpet before Super Bowl. Given the piles of Tiffany jewellery that Blake Lively wore to the game, perhaps they already are moving in that direction.
That’s probably not the fault of a too-commercialised red carpet, but to some extent, viewers are almost certainly beginning to recognise they’re watching a rigged game. It’s been a long time since Sharon Stone dressed herself in her own Gap turtleneck and Valentino ready-to-wear skirt for the 1996 Oscars. The famous event was a mishap — her pink Vera Wang gown had gotten run over by the FedEx driver who left a tyre print across its bodice. These days, gowns travel from Paris on a plane with their own stylists and seamstresses.
WalletHub, the personal finance site, analyses the price tags of each year’s Oscars and estimates the cost to dress the average star on the red carpet at $1.5 million — with most of that tally being the value of the jewellery. Cassandra Happe, the WalletHub analyst who compiled this year’s tally, says she uses public sources such as press reports to define those costs. She doesn’t know the hidden costs, including sending a label’s team from Paris for the week or the cost of a star’s contract.
Even the fiercely independent Miuccia Prada has acknowledged the benefits of the red carpet. Roughly a decade ago, over steak frites at Cafe Stella in Los Angeles, Christian Langbein, then head of public relations for Prada North America, confided that it was a challenge to get the designer interested in dressing celebrities. It wasn’t a rule – she famously dressed Uma Thurman in lavender chiffon for a best-supporting actress nomination in 1995. But more drawn to intellect, she would rather dress architect Rem Koolhaas than Brad Pitt. “Miuccia was not interested in the red carpet at the time,” Langbein told me when I reached out to him recently. A few years later, in 2014, Lupita Nyong’o wore a long blue Prada gown to the Oscars, where she was nominated and won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for her role in 12 Years a Slave.
Red carpet looks often veer from the design DNA that labels are at pains to define on their runways. Stars typically play it safe and it tends to pay off: Nyong’o’s look was a huge hit and Prada has been dressing stars on red carpets ever since.
One of the things I once loved about red carpets is that they offered, I thought, a glimpse beyond Camelot into the characters of the stars. Sharon Stone wears the Gap! Joanne Woodward sewed her own green taffeta gown for the 1958 Oscars! Now, I’m left to wonder whether Miley Cyrus was paid for wearing five outfits — including looks from Gucci, Tom Ford and Martin Margiela — at the Grammys last month.
I propose a new category for Oscars red carpet coverage: Whose agent dealt it best?
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