“Globe Trotters,” by André Leon Talley, was originally published in the March 2005 issue of Vogue.
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This was not exactly a banner fashion year for the Golden Globes. Watching the sixty-second annual awards night, beamed from the Beverly Hilton in L.A., was about as interesting as dissecting earthworms back in Biology II. In fact, the earthworms were more fun.
Just about every major star should fire her entire styling team—beginning with her hairstylist. With few exceptions—Hilary Swank, whose hair was neatly combed back and twisted into a ponytail, and Anjelica Huston, who wore her usual simple everyday hairdo—tousled bedroom hair was the order of the day. It looked to me very déclassé. Could we have some new ideas, please, from the hair and makeup people?
And on the red carpet there were no sparks, no electric wattage either. There was none of that buzz, that clubby, cliquey feeling I experienced two years ago, when I bonded with Renée Zellweger and Nicole Kidman. What has happened?
Emmy Goes To…
As I jetted out to California, my fashion radar told me that if I was going to get any scoop other than the boring, homogenized TV version, I would need to get off the red carpet and head behind the scenes.
So on Saturday afternoon I went to Ralph Lauren’s Rodeo Drive boutique to meet with eighteen-year-old Emmy Rossum, the Phantom of the Opera star, as she prepared for her big night.
Emmy is a student at Columbia University, and she is taking all this stuff very seriously. “You would never see me running around Hollywood in a cotton velour tracksuit and Uggs!” said the cygnet starlet, who has taken to the limelight like a toddler carried into the family swimming pool for his first thrashings-about. She arrived for the third of three fittings in a white piqué Ralph Lauren jacket, pencil skirt, and chic reptile slingbacks.
Emmy had gone to her first-ever fashion show, Ralph Lauren Polo, last October, and it was there that she found the germ of inspiration for her strapless white spangled-tulle dress, with the ruffled flounces-into-train: On the runway, it had appeared as a layered tulle skirt and T-shirt, worn by the model Gemma Ward. In its final incarnation, the dress—all ruffles and drape, over a boned inner lining—looked light, nothing forced or overwrought. It was a very Old Hollywood silhouette: Ralph, always prepared to dress according to Hollywood’s bulimic dress codes, focused on a very fifties hourglass—managing, though, to do this without making the star look like she was wearing a Girl Can’t Help It sausage casing.
