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January 29, 2007
Dressed to sell
In recent years, Oscar night has promoted fashion almost as enthusiastically as it has promoted the movies that win prizes.
British writer Bronwyn Cosgrave combines history and journalism in her very fine new book, “Made for Each Other: Fashion and the Academy Awards� (Bloomsbury), an overview of the role of fashion in the annual awards extravaganza.
Cosgrave is the former features editor of British Vogue and has covered the Academy Awards for the BBC.
“Made for Each Other� takes us all the way back to the first Oscar night in 1929 when actresses either wore their own clothes or pieces that were made by the studios that then held their contracts.
It took a while for the award to be taken very seriously, so both Bette Davis and Claudette Colbert wore rather casual attire at their Oscar nights in the early 1930s (Colbert was about to catch a train to New York when she was summoned to the Ambassador Hotel to pick up her prize for “It Happened One Night�).
Cosgrave shows how fashion can alter a star’s image and land Oscar vehicles in the section on Norma Shearer’s campaign to convince MGM that she was glamorous enough to star in “The Divorcee� which would win her the 1930 best actress prize.
All the way up to the late 1990s, actresses more or less dressed themselves — or asked their studio bosses to help. Greta Garbo or Katharine Hepburn or Barbra Streisand would have been mortified to serve as living product placements for designers.
The most interesting sections of the book show how everything changed in the late 1990s when more awards ceremonies (such as this weekend’s SAG prizes) started to be telecast and actresses began to feel more pressure to look good.
Designers also saw the huge cachet of having star actresses wear their designs on global telecasts (and in the extensive magazine and newspaper coverage as well).
Actresses began to accept payments for wearing particular designers and some stars are becoming so well known for their “style� that they are now hired for hugely profitable advertising campaigns as well (Cosgrave notes that Nicole Kidman has received $9 million for her Dior and Chanel spokesmodel gigs over the past decade).
The rise of Oscar night in fashion has also changed magazines such as Vogue in the past decade, with supermodels being bumped from most covers in favor of movie stars (Cosgrave quotes Vogue editor Anna Wintour saying that “Oscar madness� was responsible for this change after decades of having models on the cover).
Clearly, we have come a long way from 1958 when Joanne Woodward picked up her Oscar for “The Three Faces of Eve,� wearing a dress the actress had made herself.
Posted by Joe on January 29, 2007 2:24 PM
