Two Decades of Battling Through Awards Season Mayhem

War correspondents toil in the trenches, fashion reporters in trench coats -- preferably Lanvin or Burberry. But that's not where the comparison ends. People assume reporting on red-carpet fashion is glitzy at best, frivolous at least -- but these people remain blissfully unaware that awards-show fashion is a battlefield. Outfits get crushed. Egos get bruised. And brains and brawn actually are required to stay in the game.

Of course, a good wardrobe never hurt.

At my first Oscars in 1992, when I worked for Women's Wear Daily, I was the lone fashion reporter on the Shrine Auditorium's red carpet, and I was constantly amused by how many journalists didn't know how to spell "Armani," let alone "Giorgio." Mine was the single voice ringing out amid the din of fans, screaming, "WHAT ARE YOU WEARING????" I remember calling Julia Roberts' publicist to ask what the Pretty Woman star might be showing up in (before this info became as well guarded as Catherine Zeta-Jones' age).

"WHAT?" she screamed back. "WHY would you want to know THAT???"

Hollywood publicists resented fashion. They'd gotten used to actresses procuring outfits for themselves. And outside of Barbra Streisand's 1969 see-through Scaasi bell-bottoms and Audrey Hepburn's Givenchy sheaths, nobody cared.

Which is how every red-carpet disaster we now bemoan occurred between the '60s (end of the Studio System) and the '90s (beginning of the Stylist System), including Cher's Bob Mackie, complete with headdress, in 1988 and Geena Davis' Bo Peep dress in 1992. The red carpet then was truly a different animal; fashionwise, it was prehistoric. The Globes were completely backwoods: In 1992, the checkout line at the Beverly Hilton snaked right through arrivals. When Sarah Jessica Parker was cut off by a family with broken suitcases checking in, discount vouchers in hand, it didn't faze her. Whoopi Goldberg wandered into the press room barefoot, carrying a bottle of champagne. It was the wild, wild Globes.

Then, before anyone even knew to mourn them, fabulous Oscar and Globes fashion disasters like Demi Moore's bike shorts went the way of the dino. A couture breeze blowing in from Europe suddenly turned tornado. Madonna wore Jean Paul Gaultier's cone bra on her 1990 Blond Ambition tour, Giorgio Armani hired a Hollywood team and Gianni Versace made inroads into the pop music world before the job of "stylist" even existed. Not long after, stylists such as Jessica Paster, Deborah Waknin and Phillip Bloch started putting Valentino and Alexander McQueen on their clients. When Uma Thurman showed up in violet Prada in 1995, followed by Nicole Kidman in chartreuse satin Dior couture in 1997, we fashion writers were in Hollywood heaven.

Male Oscar nominees were dragged into the red-carpet style system kicking and screaming. When Ralph Fiennes was nominated for The English Patient in 1997, the blase Brit's response to, "What are you wearing?" was, "My underwear -- want to see the label?" (His jacket was Gucci; I actually peeked at the inside.) When Daniel Day-Lewis arrived in a frock coat and I asked who made it, he spat back, "Wrong question." My response: "Wrong event for questions about Stanislavski." There were a few icy seconds -- then abundant laughter.

Being on the red carpet then was Hollywood fashion ground zero, like being at Yahoo in 1999 (without the stock options). As red-carpet fashion earned cred in New York and Europe, awards-show coverage went off the charts. That's when the carpet morphed into a better-dressed battlefield.

I remember arriving at the Shrine by noon for the 1997 Oscars. All pros know you get to the Globes or Oscars three hours before the carpet opens. You snooze, you lose -- your designated space will be inhabited by four other people. A conundrum, I know, but somehow a law of red-carpet physics. Another weird law: If you get there first, you get shoved less.