Why is red carpet fashion so over-the-top?

Has there ever been a more gut-wrenching Oscars moment than at this year’s Academy Awards, when Jennifer Lawrence tripped over her dress as she clambered onstage to collect the award for best actress? You had to feel for her. It was her big moment, a billion people around the world were watching – and down she went. Of course, Lawrence is pure charm, and she handled the moment with aplomb, poking fun at herself from the podium. And when a reporter backstage asked her the idiotic question, “What happened?” she loosed a throaty laugh and parried, “What do you mean, ‘what happened?’ Look at my dress…”
Well, exactly: look at her dress. It was a gorgeous one – a pale pink Christian Dior sheath with a vast, billowing skirt, first seen on model Manon Leloup in the finale of Dior’s Spring 2013 haute couture show. But it was hard to know what Lawrence was doing in that dress. She’s an earthy, goofy girl, with a good deal of steel in her spine; you’d never cast her as a docile princess in a fairy tale. So why does she have to play that part on the red carpet?
Red carpet fashion is vexing to fashion people. To be sure, it’s big business. The industry can barely produce enough frocks to dress every A, B and C-list celeb for all the awards shows, premieres, festivals, galas and sundry other ‘appearances’ they attend in the course of a year. The fight to dress stars is fierce: if you put the right dress on the right girl, your brand will reap untold benefits. The classic example is Liz Hurley, wearing that iconic safety pin number to the premiere of Four Weddings and a Funeral. That dress established Versace as a household name. Many a handbag has been sold on the back of it.
But red carpet dressing is also curiously irrelevant to fashion. From the point-of-view of fashion as art, as style, there’s nothing interesting about an Oscars dress. Looking over the photos from the rain-soaked premiere of The Great Gatsby at Cannes was a pretty dreary exercise. Carey Mulligan looked chic; Nicole Kidman hit all the right notes in her strapless, floral, tea-length gown; and Julianne Moore looked great, too, aside from her ill-fitting shoes. They were all wearing Dior and thanks to new creative director Raf Simons, the house is killing it on the red carpet these days. But still, it was all quite underwhelming – nothing looked exciting or new.
Which brings me back to Jennifer Lawrence, and her Dior dress at the Oscars. Lawrence was wearing that tricky pink gown because she is the face of Miss Dior, a prestigious and no doubt highly remunerative gig. She’s obliged to wear the clothes. But couldn’t she have worn one of Dior’s more adventurous looks? Wouldn’t it have felt fresh to see a young woman like Lawrence, who I suspect likes to mooch around in jeans, collect her Oscar in a pair of trim silver tuxedo trousers and a swirling bustier top? Or if it had to be a dress, why not an intelligent and intriguingly constructed little black dress?
Notes on camp
If Lawrence had worn either of those to the Academy Awards, there would have been howls from the peanut gallery: Joan Rivers and her ilk, the snarky tabloid editors and the viperish internet horde. Hollywood actresses are all but marched to the guillotine if they don’t play by a set of rules for formality and glamour that seemed dated even in the 1950s. The only other group of people so committed to those vintage feminine codes, at least that I can think of, are drag queens.