Style, pizzazz and celebrity fashion are on display. It’s Oscars time – and nothing speaks of the razzle-dazzle more than the stars, starlets… and the red carpet.
These days, it’s a plush crimson strip of flooring that’s synonymous with Hollywood glitz and glamour. However, the history of the red carpet began long before film was invented.
Fun facts about the red carpet
The red carpet may appear to stretch for kilometres, but it’s not usually as long as it looks in photographs. The average red carpet is just three metres long and 1.2 metres wide.
At Oscars 2024, the red carpet carried significantly more length. Prior to installation, it consisted of 30 rolls, each measuring 3.6 by 4.6 metres. The completed red carpet covered 4,645 square metres of “runway”.
It took 18 people 900 hours to lay, painstakingly cutting it to fit, and applying double-sided tape to prevent slips and trips. It was fabricated from nylon in a shade of red called Academy Red.
Only the Texas-based flooring company knows the specs. It doesn’t share the info with anyone. The reason? It has been the preferred installer of the red carpet at the Academy Awards since 2008.
Oscar red carpets are used just once and then destroyed in a secret location.
The ancient history of the red carpet
The history of the red carpet goes back to 458 BC. In his tragedy Agamemnon, the ancient Greek playwright Aeschylus mentions a red carpet. When King Agamemnon returned from the Trojan war, his wife laid down a “red path” for him to walk on.
The red carpet and political power
In Renaissance paintings, kings are often shown standing or sitting on thrones atop crimson carpets.
In more modern times, red carpets have retained an association with power and politics, adding pomp and ceremony to various events. Heads of state and other dignitaries find themselves on red carpets when arriving at banquets and disembarking planes.
The origin of red carpet treatment
Getting the “red carpet treatment” means being treated like a VIP, but it’s not Hollywood that gave rise to this expression.
In the 1900s, the New York Central launched the exclusive 20th Century Limited passenger train service between New York and Chicago. To make passengers feel important, they walked their way down a crimson carpet to their waiting carriages.
Red carpet and celebrities: how it all started
Swashbuckling hero of the Twenties Douglas Fairbanks was the first Hollywood star to get the red carpet treatment. Impresario Sid Grauman insisted on rolling out the red carpet at the 1922 premiere of silent movie Robin Hood.
It soon became synonymous with Hollywood luminaries like Clark Gable, Joan Crawford, Grace Kelly and Marilyn Monroe. Ironically, few knew the carpet was red then. It was before the days of widespread colour photography.
In the 1970s, with the rise of celebrity and gossip magazines, celebrity watching truly began. Now, at awards evenings and fashion events, major brands pay to have their signage and product launches placed on the red carpet.
The red carpet: a celebrity circus?
Some say the red carpet phenomenon has become a celebrity circus. This dates to the late 1990s, when acerbic mother-daughter duo Joan and Melissa Rivers started giving their catty commentary on fashion from the Oscars red carpet for E! Entertainment.
Soon, the walking-in procession became more popular than the event itself. Everyone wanted to see the interaction between reporters and actors, and to have the answer to that all-important question: “What are they wearing?”
To avoid being humiliated for poor choices, actresses began hiring stylists. Design houses began paying stars to wear their dresses, so they could act as “brand ambassadors”.
Now TV stations stream hours of live red-carpet coverage to feed audience demand. There’s a Mani Cam to show what manicures the stars favour; and a Glam Cam 360 lets us see the glittering frocks from every angle.
