The proliferation of red carpet opportunities has turned celebrity dressing into a fierce battle for attention, with implications for brands.
Clockwise from the top: Hailey Bieber in Saint Laurent, Meg Ryan in Loewe, Colman Domingo in Valentino, Chloë Sevigny in Saint Laurent. Clockwise from the top: MEGA/GC Images, Taylor Hill/FilmMagic, Taylor Hill/FilmMagic, Monica Schipper/Getty
Earlier this month, Gucci descended on Los Angeles to host its annual LACMA Art+Film Gala. Besides those debuting Sabato De Sarno’s latest — we’ll come back to this later — celebrity guests were dressed in what’s become the norm on the red carpet: straight-off-the-runway fashion. Chloë Sevigny, for one, wore a Saint Laurent look that graced the runway just over a month ago, as did Greta Lee with her The Row ensemble, and Troye Sivan was one of the first to wear Prada’s spring 2025 menswear collection.
The Spring/Summer 2025 season ended just about a month ago, but already, what we saw on the runways has flooded celebrity events. And there have been many celebrity events, from movie premieres and film festivals, to galas, benefits and awards ceremonies. For each, stars were dressed in looks from labels’ most recent collections. Meg Ryan, Lee and Ayo Edebiri all donned the latest Loewe; Andrew Garfield, Lana Del Rey, Hari Nef, Natasha Lyonne and Colman Domingo have worn Alessandro Michele’s freshly debuted Valentino; Nicole Kidman wore this season’s Bottega Veneta; Cynthia Erivo wore SS25 Erdem; and Kerry Washington, Katie Holmes and Joey King wore just-shown Carolina Herrera.
This wasn’t always the case. A few years ago, the runway-to-red carpet pipeline was representative of fashion’s production and seasonal calendar — meaning runway looks would be worn by celebrities around the time the collections would hit stores. These moments of promo acted as a way to ‘bump’ last season’s looks up in people’s minds as they prepared to go to retail, several months after showing on the runway. That pipeline has now shrunk to reflect our shorter and shorter attention spans: they make it, we see it, they wear it — basically all at once.
It’s a clear shift in strategy, but is it for the better?
Winds of change
The red carpet attention economy has reached new heights in the years since the pandemic. “It feels like, over the past six months to a year, there is a red carpet event every other night,” said stylist Carlos Nazario when I phoned him to talk about the trend cycle. “It has reached a fever pitch, and it translates into this appetite for dressing up and being out.” Nazario was pointing at the abundance of cocktail attire in recent collections, but his point about the red carpet remains. There has been a proliferation of opportunities for celebrities to step out, and, in turn, for brands to seize the day and create a moment.
On the talent and stylist side, the abundance of events translates into a fierce competition to outdo each other in the eyes of internet commentators as well as the occasional fashion writer and best-dressed list. The inarguable biggest flex is to either wear an archival deep cut or to pull a look straight off the runway. Being ‘first’ here translates to prominence: most famous, best dressed, most access.
“During Fashion Week, I’m constantly refreshing Vogue Runway and the Latest Shows page, and I will either Whatsapp, email or DM [a publicist] to ask how soon I can get a look,” said Chris Horan, who styles Charli XCX, when I interviewed him to speak about the Sweat Tour for Vogue.com. “I don’t think either [me or Charli] are blind to the fact that we have to capitalise [being] at our peak,” he added.
This has made many red carpet-friendly labels shift their strategies away from the traditional fashion calendar — a shift that has much to do with the way in which we consume runway shows today. Ticks like standout sets, unexpected castings or a viral-prone front row are now commonplace, as each brand is hopeful to make their runway show a moment. After the show’s over, the way to extend said moment is to extrapolate the most recognisable looks and put them on some of today’s most recognisable faces.
A primary concern with making clothes available so fast used to be the possibility of exhausting the collection and making it ‘old news’ before customers were even able to wear it. That seems to no longer be of concern. Take Hailey Bieber wearing Saint Laurent SS25 on a night out two weeks ago. Certainly not a red carpet, but a social media opportunity. The customer this reaches is not the typical luxury consumer, but the aspirational one. They may not be shelling out a couple thousand dollars on Bieber’s two-piece suit, but they’ll buy the Saint Laurent fragrance or lipstick that aligns them to her and their idea of her style.
After the storm
One luxury brand in particular has spun a significant strategy out of celebrity red carpet dressing: Daniel Roseberry’s Schiaparelli, the once-dormant label that’s been revived thanks to said publicity. It was a combination of his outlandish designs and its omnipresence on the red carpet that helped Roseberry and Schiaparelli reach new heights. The designer was announced International Designer of the Year at the CFDA Awards last week.
This also means Roseberry has had to learn how to toe the line between being present while dressing key figures of the zeitgeist, and simply seeming too available. Early on, Schiaparelli made an impact dressing celebrities for significant cultural moments, including Bella Hadid at the Cannes Film Festival in 2021, Beyoncé for the 63rd Grammy Awards (where she became the most-awarded woman in the Recording Academy’s history), Adele for her 2021 comeback tour, plus Lorde and Lady Gaga for their respective Vogue covers. It quickly began dressing everyone from Noah Cyrus and Taylor Swift to Jennifer Lopez; and suddenly, Schiaparelli was everywhere. The maison has now noticeably pulled back on the amount of celebrities it outfits. At the Academy Museum Gala last month, Schiaparelli dressed a single celebrity: Kendall Jenner, who also wore an ‘ancient’ look by today’s standards, from SS24 couture.
“It’s changed because now the couture has become in such high demand that before the show, I sit down with the press team and select like five to seven looks that are embargoed from clients,” Roseberry told Vogue Runway and Vogue Business global director Nicole Phelps on an episode of Vogue’s ‘The Run-Through’ podcast, speaking of Schiaparelli’s red carpet strategy. He was referring to the speed at which his couture will sell to clients with regional exclusivity on a first-come, first-served basis, but also in reference to the popularity of his designs for the red carpet. If a client has exclusivity in the US or Europe to one of the couture looks, Schiaparelli cannot leverage it for press.
This shift in strategy at Schiaparelli not only illustrates its desirability, but also what happens when successful omnipresence on the red carpet works. Its visibility has raised the brand’s profile, and it has, in turn, made its couture not only covetable to celebrities, but to customers too. Pulling back on how much is available, or seen, will help define the future for Schiaparelli, and speaks to the tightrope of exposure.
“I think it’s just become so exhausting to see people and designers try and outdo [each other] and it just ends up looking like clown clothes sometimes,” continued Roseberry, this time about the state of the red carpet. “I am feeling more restrained. I want to make it more about her and less about this huge 50 yards of fuchsia, whatever that is surrounding her. I liked what I saw at the Academy [Museum] Gala. It felt like there was sobriety settling in.” Such is the swing of the pendulum in fashion, the further we go, the harder we pull back.
The real challenge for Schiaparelli — and luxury brands at large — will be to balance exposure and desirability while promoting sustained growth as opposed to further fatigue. Jenner wore that Schiaparelli couture dress nine months after the collection debuted on the runway, despite others having worn the collection before her (Emma Corrin and Philippine Leroy-Beaulieu). Loewe will be another label to watch next, given its current level of exposure and the fact that, unlike Schiaparelli, it does not operate with the same exclusivity that a couture house does. Ditto the archival space — as a friend, archive collector and seller once told me, not all vintage is good vintage. We are reaching a place of exhaustion, to the point where the hits don’t hold the same weight because the novelty has worn off.
Back to Gucci, under De Sarno’s the LACMA Gala, which is presented by the brand, has become a launchpad for the Gucci Notte collection of eveningwear. While many guests still wear other labels, the majority of high-profile attendees are outfitted by Gucci in the capsule. Louis Vuitton has done something similar by deploying an abundance of its own ambassadors in custom looks at events, most notably and recently at the Academy Museum Gala.
These brands are collapsing the pipeline altogether, turning the red carpet into the runway. The caveat here is that only brands at that level can pull something like this off. For the industry’s scrappier players, the path forwards is a little more nebulous. The only option for them, it seems, is to continue to toe the line between being in the spotlight and overexposed.
Originally published in Voguebusiness.com
