When the flashing cameras are gone and the curtains are closed, where do all the red carpet dresses go?
“Those days of a dress being packed away and forgotten for many years and rediscovered are sadly gone,” Lucy Bishop, a bag and fashion specialist at Sotheby’s, told CNN.
“Now, often when a dress is worn on the red carpet, there’s usually a plan put in place as to where that dress is going to end up.”
Some rarities are gifted or bought by the A-list wearer – for example, Kim Kardashian has an archive of many of her Met Gala looks, while Zendaya bought her 1996 black Givenchy dress designed by John Galliano , from fashion’s biggest dress. night in 2024 – a trend that was more popular decades ago.
Bishop told CNN that Nicole Kidman’s 1997 Oscars dress — a chartreuse number by Galliano — was a piece that “changed the trajectory of red carpet dressing” and marked the beginning of brands “very publicly partnering with a celebrity.” celebrities and sort of their formal red carpet attire.”
Before then, it was more common for celebrities to wear the dress they wore on the carpet and, according to CNN, sometimes those dresses were even sold or donated.
Today, most ensembles are placed in warehouses or displayed in galleries, while some are sold at auction for hefty sums.
“Most of the time it goes back and is stored in the designer’s archives,” designer Tanya Gill previously told Vanity Fair in 2017, though there are rare exceptions when designers will “happily donate the dress,” Gill added.
“It’s like Cinderella, she wears it to the ball and at midnight she has to come back.”
According to Cleveland Museum of Art chief conservator Sarah Scaturro, the dresses are subject to cleaning, as the person who donated the garment “may have body lotions, oils, perfumes, makeup.” She told CNN that “even if you don’t see it right away…over time, these materials and stains can start to oxidize and they will start to change the color of the fabric, and maybe even the texture.”
Sometimes the pieces are dry cleaned, while other times they are washed or simply vacuumed and dusted, depending on the fabric and style.
Most of the time, the dresses are then placed in special storage, whether they are archives at a fashion house or a private facility, CNN reported.
But they don’t just sit in boxes to collect dust.
“It’s really a case-by-case basis for how each particular item is assembled or stored,” Julie Ann Clauss, founder of The Wardrobe, told the media.
“So some things hang, some things are boxed, and some things have to be assembled, which means they are worn, like a dress form, because these things are designed to be worn. They are not designed in true for hanging or lying down.
The wardrobe houses around 100,000 garments from a variety of designers, precious cargo that requires precise storage conditions such as low lighting and ideal humidity and temperature levels to be preserved.
These pieces usually leave the Los Angeles or New York warehouses only if they are selected to be worn again on the red carpet or shown in an exhibition.
Getting the dresses out on the street, however, is hard work.
Clauss told CNN for a while that she needed to carry pieces of clothing that were “these three-dimensional things, big, but brilliant beads, heavy crystals on very delicate tulle.”
“I was like, ‘Guys, we can’t put these in a box…'” she recalls. “They need custom-made mounts so they’re stable flying internationally, and then they have to have a crate built around it. You see these crates and they’re incredible, sometimes they’re 7 meters long for a dress.”
However, some dresses do not even leave the carpet or outside the event, such as Tyla’s sandy Balmain dress, which was cut off at the end of the evening after last year’s Met Gala.
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Image Source : nypost.com