Filming may have been over when this year's awards season hopefuls headed to the desert for the Palm Springs International Film Festival in early January, but the performances were just beginning in the months-long charm offensive by potential nominees. It's a dry run for the Golden Globes, after which every step-and-repeat party arrival and A-list luncheon is crucial in a parade that lasts six weeks before zero hour: the Oscars on Feb. 28.
Step is the operative word here. After a few years of cake-topper froth, the thigh-high slit is in (see: Outlander Caitriona Balfe). As surely as Charlize Theron will wear Dior, organizations do their bit and cook up achievement awards for those in the running. At Palm Springs, Cate Blanchett wore longsleeved Marc Jacobs, a 1940s throwback in Wallis Simpson blue that was split up the back, so that when she sashayed onstage (say that 10 times fast) to collect her award, there was a glimpse of the sort of treasure once insured, like Jamie Lee Curtis, Betty Grable or Cyd Charisse's legs, by Lloyds of London. All this sleek peekaboo serves to emphasize the pageantry of the walk.
Calling attention to that motion brings to mind the 19th-century "walking dresses" described in She's Got Legs, Jane Merrill and Keren Ben-Horin's new history of leg fashion and the ideas, economics and status of women in society that have surrounded its trends (whether covered or uncovered) and social conventions over the centuries (think sport, dance, performance and spectacle: Marilyn Monroe on the subway grate in The Seven Year Itch, the torn pantyhose of punk, or Serena Williams and her powerful bare legs recently enthroned on the cover of Sports Illustrated). "The woman of prehistory," Merrill says, beginning with cave-dwelling Paleolithic hunters that lived thousands of years ago, "was concerned with showing she was fleet of foot, because that was healthy." Carved representations and artefacts show the women not in pelts but already wearing twisted string and low-slung flax skirtlets, to signal being of child-bearing age and draw attention to how their anatomy (hips) was different from men.
With walking dresses, attached ribbons temporarily raised modest hemlines above the shoe to enable a more comfortable promenade, the showy walkabout that was the well-to-do pastime of the bourgeois set. Watching women walk is nothing new.
Such walks in Hollywood have been a spectator sport ever since Sid Grauman's Egyptian Theatre hosted the first-ever gala film premiere in 1922 (for Douglas Fairbanks' swashbuckler Robin Hood). It was little more than the actors stepping out of a car and walking to the theatre's front entrance for a crush of onloookers but, by default, the first red carpet all the same. The fan craze then expanded to arrivals and departures outside parties and local star hangouts like the Brown Derby restaurant.
The 1953 Oscars ceremony was the first to be broadcast on television. In the 2015 film Life, director Anton Corbin dramatizes how already by 1954, Warner's studio publicity plans for James Dean's image and career hinged less on performance than on how well – or in his case, awkwardly – the actor (played by Dane DeHaan) worked the all-important cameras at the premiere for then-girlfriend Pier Angeli's movie The Silver Chalice.
Nowadays photo editors choose highlights of designer collections based on the red carpet potential of the clothes and evaluate the cumulative red carpet prowess of actress contenders. This season's most frequent subjects of scrutiny are relative newcomers Brie Larson and Alicia Vikander. The latter's Mona Lisa smile and style are the muse for designer Nicolas Ghesquière at Louis Vuitton. But even Vikander's impressive breakout roles (in 2015 alone: Ex Machina, The Man from U.N.C.L.E., Burnt, Testament of Youth, The Danish Girl) have been eclipsed by another coy leggy reveal: Jaden Smith, son of Will and Jada, appearing in Vuitton's women's-wear ad campaign as the face of spring – or more accurately as the legs, since he's wearing an embroidered women's skirt.
Even a man in a skirt has historical roots. The fierce goddess Ishtar, writes Merrill in She's Got Legs, is immortalized in a cylinder seal that depicts her deliberately revealing a muscular leg from beneath her short kilt and cloak. To modern eyes it may look like a showgirl doing a dance step until researcher Zainab Bahrani, Columbia professor of Near Eastern history, steps into the narrative to explain that the warrior men of the period also wore short kilts, giving the ensemble new meaning – not starlet step-and-repeat gear but battle clothing. Ishtar was a complicated goddess who represented sexuality and love but also, as I will now think of her while actors jostle for popularity walking the red carpet this season, the goddess of war.
Nathalie Atkinson