The turning point came on April 14, 1969 – fashionable, feminist, generational. Hollywood held its breath when Barbra Streisand took the stage at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion to accept her Oscar for leading actress for Funny Girl. Because the 26-year-old Streisand didn’t wear the expected floor-length shift dress, but translucent black nightclub pajamas somewhere between a clown and Yves Saint Laurent. Bob Mackie, the up-and-coming young costume designer she trusts, made it opaque with skin-colored underwear, but not physically stringent. In the flashlight of the photographers, it looked as if Miss Streisand’s buttocks were just: naked under the tulle and the (also net-like) beige marquisette. Especially when she tripped and fell over a bit.
The photo of the amused look that Ingrid Bergman, who was also awarded and known for her proud abstinence from fashion, cast at Streisand in front of her, is a snapshot for eternity. And of course he’s in this book.
Fashion history as a leaf festival
Such moments are provided by the Prestel illustrated book “Oscars – Glamor on the Red Carpet”, which is no coincidence that it was published right now, just before the star parade at the 95th Academy Awards in Los Angeles. Let’s put it plainly: the book, written by Australian fashion expert Dijanna Mulhearn, is a sensation. An absolutely overdue leaf festival for film fans, a fashion history from 1929 to 2022 that is almost bursting with detailed information. And with it an early centennial celebration of the Oscars.
1940: Hattie McDaniel (with FP Yober) wins an Oscar for her supporting role in Gone With the Wind. She has to go through a side entrance to the award ceremony, according to the Ambassador Hotel’s disgraceful “Whites Only” door policy.Prestel Verlag/abcdvdvideo.com
Arranged chronologically, the illustrated book starts with the very first Academy Awards, which were still held as sedate dinners in luxury hotels where Hollywood kept to itself. But by 1940 at the latest, the awards had become highly political: when the black actress Hattie McDaniel received the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress for her portrayal of the domestic worker Mammy in the then highly acclaimed film “Gone with the Wind”. McDaniel wore then-chic camellias in her hair and on her lapels, but she had to come to dinner through a side entrance and sit apart from her co-stars like Vivien Leigh and Clark Gable. Mulhearn is to her credit for not sparing the readership of such historical facts.
The female star as a box of chocolates
Another thing that catches the eye when studying the early years is how much older the stars of Hollywood’s golden era appear in photographs than they really were. The 21-year-old Joan Fontaine, for example, looks with an updo and a white fur jacket (movie buffs bKnown as the unassumingly resilient central character of Hitchcock’s 1940’s Rebecca) looks to today’s eyes like a woman in her late 30s, early 40s. The same goes for Grace Kelly, perhaps the most even-toned film beauty of all time, and other beauties of the 1950s. They look as if they are not only ready for their close-ups, but for the marriage market. Her performances are paternalistically interwoven, which probably has to do with the fact that newcomers in this film epoch were dressed up for the Oscars by the much older chief costume designers of the studios. Ruffled cascades, floral embroidery, bows and almost always low-cut – the female star as a candy dish from the confectionery department. Even the young Joan Collins had to adapt to this debutante aesthetic in 1958.
1962: Warren Beatty and Natalie Wood. His tuxedo bow is obviously hand-tied, her halterneck dress was designed by legendary costume designer Orry-Kelly.Prestel Verlag/Brettmann/Getty Images
What came after suggests that Beverly Hills was the main inspiration for Barbie’s early wardrobe. Many of the actresses appear as if they were puppets zoomed in to human dimensions. Only in the mid-1960s did the picture begin to change radically. Which on the one hand had to do with the European film stars who stopped by Hollywood on flying visits, and on the other hand with the simultaneous rise in fashion in Paris, London and Rome.
The film world mutated into a jet set, the Atlantic was crossed in hours rather than days, and the boundaries between film and fashion became increasingly permeable. Jane Fonda, who was dating the Nouvelle Vague director Roger Vadim at the time, also wore the sometimes simple, sometimes hippie-opulent feminism of the young Parisian fashion star Yves Saint Laurent to the Oscars.
The New York Halston saves the elegance
After the childish excesses of the 1960s with minis and textile grids over the stomach, New York designers such as Roy Halston and, a little later, Calvin Klein gave the female body back its dignity without neglecting eroticism. Halston’s ultra-simple yet highly refined sarong dresses from 1975/76 for Elizabeth Taylor, Angelica Huston, Marisa Berenson or Lauren Hutton, as well as Richard Tyler’s white trouser suit for Diane Keaton, are eye-openers in the book. Proof that something like timeless elegance is possible even in the hustle and bustle of Oscar night.
1989: “Bad Girl” Drew Barrymore in a Betsey Johnson tube dress and “Bad Boy” Corey Feldman in a vampire look. You can see: Even the non-stars dressed more and more individually for the Oscars.Prestel Verlag/Alan Light
And: Who would have thought that linebacker shoulders weren’t the hallmark of 1980s evening fashion, but rather puffy club sleeves? 1981 presented in an ideal-typical way on the wedding dress made of ivory-white taffeta by Diana Spencer, who from then on made the British monarchy’s legs as “Lady Di” or led her to the edge of the abyss. But world fashion also had an impact, as the book shows.
You discover something else: that the vintage movement in fashion did not just begin recently, but rather ran through the entire second half of the 20th century as a thread of the individual. At the Oscars, this was thanks to Los Angeles’ well-stocked thrift boutiques like Lily et Cie. But it also reveals the longings of young stars and their identification with Jean Harlow or Louise Brooks. This became an inside trend when young stars like Molly Ringwald, Winona Ryder, Martha Plimpton and Juliette Lewis sported the flowing satin and beaded dresses of the ’20s to ’40s in the 1980s and ’90s. And in it, thanks to casual hairstyles and jewelry abstinence, looked great. Although: Angie Dickinson already appeared on the Oscar carpet in 1976 in an exact copy of that “nude dress” with strategic sequin trimmings that fascinated Marlene Dietrich at her comeback concerts in the 1960s. (Dickinson was then married to Burt Bacharach, who had accompanied Dietrich at her concerts.)
Fashion total failures: Demi Moore ’89, Kim Basinger ’90, Geena Davis ’92
Dijanna Mulhearn’s selection of images takes us on a fast journey through the ebb and flow of elegance over the last few decades. Including the total failures, such as: Kim Basinger in 1990 and Geena Davis in 1992, each in a little girl’s dream of a grand entrance. Demi Moore also remained unfamiliarly unforgettable in 1989, in an outfit of black Lycra shorts with a fluttering gold brocade skirt around the back, which he also thought up himself.
1996: Susan Sarandon in a Dolce & Gabbana satin gown on her way to the lead Oscar for Dead Man Walking. And lo and behold: sunglasses in the evening work, and how.Prestel Verlag/Frank Trapper/Getty Images
The mixing of cheap and expensive was aesthetically more successful, which became a megatrend in the 1990s and manifested itself in 1996 and 1998 in Sharon Stone’s combination of a black Gap cotton turtleneck and a white men’s shirt with a long satin skirt. And in between, again and again: Giorgio Armani saving the star image – to Meryl Streep, to Michelle Pfeiffer, to Glenn Close and Jodie Foster. Even the Maestro from Milan wasn’t all that successful.
Then, in the 2000s, a dance on a volcano that would erupt with the credit implosion of 2008. The robes are so overloaded with Belle Epoque style, so virtuously over-decorated, as if they were making fun of themselves. Something new begins around 2010, visible in Ricardo Tisci’s Givenchy on Cate Blanchett or Giambattista Valli’s feather-light chiffon abundance on Lupita Nyong’o and Zendaya. Or Anne Hathaway in 2013 in pastel pink satin by Prada, as if Audrey Hepburn’s grace were back.
The gentlemen stayed in tails for a long time
And the men? Always had it easier. They stuck to tails (until the 1960s, as evidenced by photos of Sidney Poitier, Robert Wagner and a teenage Ronald Reagan) or tuxedos, and enjoyed themselves. After a brief flurry of fashion self-expression in the 1970s with ricochets like Donald Sutherland and Jack Nicholson, the black tie from Armani, Zegna and Gucci reigned supreme on the red carpet. Only in recent years have Jared Leto, Adrien Brody and the angelic Timothée Chalamet broken this phalanx of black-and-white uniformity. Billy Porter 2019 with his man-woman robe by Christian Siriano (tuxedo on top, Queen Victoria below) showed the ultimate, highly aesthetic finger.
2014: Lupita Nyong’o in the Prada goddess dress, she received the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress for “12 Years a Slave”. Her diamond-studded headband was immediately mass-patterned with rhinestones.Prestel Verlag/Christopher Polk/Getty Images
So what do you take away from this book? That sunglasses look their coolest when paired with an evening gown or tuxedo. But also evidence of the time and/or economic pressure under which the globalization of glamor in the print sector takes place. Even with glamorous projects like this. Unfortunately, knowledgeable readers keep stumbling over fatal factual errors that must have happened when translating from the English original. The Beirut couturier Elie Saab, who dressed the Oscar winner Halle Berry, is suddenly female, and the designer and stylist L’Wren Scott (after all, life partner of Mick Jagger for many years) is male. On page 272, Karl Lagerfeld’s early years at Chloé are transformed into a job “for Hervé Leger,” who only got involved in fashion much later. Awkward.
Prestel Publishers
Oscars – Glamor on the red carpet
The very last pages of the volume then also signal what price an overdriven globalization of glamor had and still has for the phenomenon of “style”. That more is lost than just a few moon fees for paparazzi. In any case, the stars don’t look happy in the final pictures in front of the same PR wall with the golden Oscar logo. Free leg, standing leg, everything is great, the clothes fit and can be seen in full length from the front, as it probably says in the relevant contracts. But it’s as if these actresses and actors have already become their own avatars. They look shiny but empty in their outfits, like strange industrial products. Or like the Oscar statuette itself.