The red carpet look- Is it being undermined by the new fashion market?
It’s almost impossible to turn on or look at anything online, on TV or anywhere else without a red carpet sequence. If they open a new packet of Kleenex somewhere, there’s a red carpet event, mainly full of cheerful, smiling nonentities nobody asked to see. The red carpet look is obviously fading, fast. What’s noticeable, however, is that the red carpet stuff is also starting to look pretty sad, dated and overdone, even compared to sites where you buy dresses online.
History of the red carpet look
The fact is that the red carpet look is a victim of its own culture. This is the revenge of the designers who’ve been locked out of the “upper crust” for generations, and it’s poetic justice in many ways. The red carpet designers have had a monopoly for so long.
In the past, if you were a star you could wear “a gown made by…….”, and that was the designer’s big break. You were made for years, if not for life. That was in the days before the red carpet looked like a cattle drive, and thousands of instantly forgettable people trudged past the cameras.
The problem in the old days was that the designers also monopolized the red carpet crowd. You had to have been a red carpet designer, to be a red carpet designer. These designers were really expensive, and if you could pay for various forms of defamation in your size, that was the choice of what to wear.
The red carpet designers weren’t actually better designers, but they had the names and labels. If you can imagine anyone capable of making Audrey Hepburn look anything other than a million percent elegant, even the old red carpet designers didn’t succeed, but almost. The revolution was always going to come, it was simply a matter of when.
New stage in the evolution of the fashion market?
The new fashion design industry is blowing away big name designers and labels on an hourly basis. The new designers distribute better, market better, and above all, they’re truly competent designers. There’s also a lot of them, and they’re highly competitive. They know how to sell, and they do.
The trouble with being an upmarket designer is you’re either there or nowhere, and that’s exactly what’s happening. The new designers can muscle in with a range of new products, better technology, and they do get market share.
Anyone who knows the rag trade knows what happens next- Contracts start flying, promotions start happening, and if you get in the way of that, you’re uninsurable. The fashion industry is all about verbs, like “profit”, not adjectives like “tasteful”.
It’s an interesting fact, however, that you can look at an online product like a Ladakh dress, and have to spend some time noticing the differences between these dresses and the “upmarket” stuff. The online people are very production oriented, and their quality levels are defined by being good looking and wearable by human beings. The old red carpet models can be anything between high school dress-up standard and a liver condition in Paris.
If you want a bet on this subject, back the new designers.
Hollywood writer Stephen Cannell, the producer of TV shows like "The A-Team" and "The Rockford Files", has died at the age of 69, his family said on Friday.