Dress and Power: From Court Dress to Red Carpet Fashion

Every awards season, audiences tune in for more than a ceremony. Before a single prize is presented, attention is on the red carpet, where dress becomes a spectacle. By any measure, the awards-season red carpet is among the most closely watched fashion stages in the world. Yet the use of clothing to project authority and status is far older than Hollywood. Join us as we explore how the wealthy and powerful have long shaped customs, standards and even laws to ensure that fashion serves as an outward sign of rank, privilege and influence within society.

The Original Dress Codes: Ancient Empires and the Politics of Cloth

We can start our exploration high in the South American Andes with the Inca Empire, which flourished c. 1400–1533 CE. The Incan people may not have had a written language, but they absolutely communicated hierarchy through textiles with extraordinary precision. Sumptuary laws strictly separated the classes: commoners typically wore plain, coarse awaska cloth—undyed or simply colored tunics and mantles of llama or alpaca wool, with lighter cotton garments in warmer regions—while the elite reserved the most intricate designs and finest fibers for themselves.

The emperor, known as the Sapa Inca, alone could wear garments woven from vicuña wool, along with the Mascaypacha, a red-fringed headdress that signaled his sacred and hereditary right to rule. In many ways, textiles were valued more highly than gold in the Inca world, functioning as tribute, diplomatic gifts, currency and visible markers of one’s stratified place in society.

Ancient Rome operated under a similarly codified system of dress. Romans famously referred to themselves as togati, or “people of the toga,” yet the garment itself was less universal than that phrase suggests. In practice, it was closely associated with male citizens of status and carried its own internal hierarchy: the bright white toga candida for political candidates, dark woolen togas for mourning and the toga picta—purple and embroidered with gold—reserved for victorious generals during a triumph. The female equivalent, at least for married patrician women, was the stola, pictured here in the stele relief fragment.

If the toga was largely a garment of rank and ceremony, why does it loom so large in the popular imagination as the standard dress of Roman men? Togas appear again and again in marble statues because they were the dress of those in authority and the means to commission such statues.

Fashion and Power Through History

What had been, in Rome, a powerful visual code of rank became, in later Europe, an increasingly rigid legal system, as governments sought to control who could wear the materials, colors and symbols of privilege. By the 14th century, legislation had spread across Europe, regulating dress down to the finest detail—the materials permitted to different ranks, the colors reserved for the nobility. In Tudor England, violations could result in arrest.

Gender and dress also carried particularly high stakes within this system. In the early 15th century, Joan of Arc famously wore male military dress while leading French forces, and as long as she was delivering victories for the crown, that choice was largely tolerated. At her trial, however, the same clothing was turned against her: citing the biblical prohibition in Deuteronomy against women wearing men’s garments, her wardrobe choice was recast as a religious transgression.

At the same time, newly powerful mercantile families began to challenge traditional hierarchies. In Renaissance Italy, families such as the Medici of Florence—whose wealth derived from commerce rather than inherited title—understood the importance of appearance in establishing legitimacy. Their rise fueled anxieties about what was sometimes called the “fraud of fashion”: the fear that dress could be used to blur the line between aristocracy and newly acquired wealth.

Queen Elizabeth I understood these dynamics and exploited them masterfully. She carefully constructed a visual language of royal exclusivity through dress, deploying baroque pearls, elaborate ruffs and monumental gowns as instruments of statecraft. In her portraits, clothing became a form of propaganda—every embroidered motif and luminous jewel a deliberate assertion of power beyond the reach of even the wealthiest subjects.

No discussion of power dressing is complete without Louis XIV, who turned personal appearance into a political instrument at Versailles. With towering wigs, red heels and lavish silk embroidery, the Sun King used dress not only to indulge vanity but to stage authority. By compelling his court to mirror his sumptuous style, he transformed appearance into a system of control and established a standard of opulence on a scale Europe had never before seen shared across an entire aristocratic class.

By the early 19th century, the revolutionary rejection of aristocratic excess produced what historians describe as the “Great Male Renunciation”—a deliberate simplification of men’s dress. The performance of male authority moved from adornment to restraint, a convention that continues to shape formal dress today.

By the late 19th century, fashionable dress had become more streamlined and restrained than the extravagant court costumes of earlier centuries, though not all forms of public display had turned demure. During the Belle Époque, stage stars such as Sarah Bernhardt cultivated larger-than-life public identities through dramatic hairstyles, opulent costumes and a commanding theatrical presence that blurred the line between performance and self-fashioning.

The era’s celebrated posters, particularly those by Alphonse Mucha, helped fix this vision of the actress as a modern icon, transforming theatrical costume into a powerful form of public image-making. The 20th century would carry this evolution even further, shifting the performance of power from court and stage to entirely new public arenas.

Hollywood and the Costume Designers Who Built the Red Carpet

The 20th century produced a new kind of court. Designers associated with both stage and society, including Erté, helped define this language of modern glamour. He designed for famed performers such as Mistinguett, the celebrated French singer and actress who rose to prominence in the cabarets of Paris and became the highest-paid female entertainer of her era. In works such as his 1917 costume for her performance in Marvels of the Orient at the Théâtre du Bataclan, Erté matched her exuberant personal style with vivid color, theatrical form and bold headpieces, helping shape the larger-than-life visual identity that made stars legible to the public.

Early Hollywood studios—MGM, Warner Bros. and Paramount—operated under a system that controlled nearly every aspect of a star’s public image. Costume designers also shaped how they appeared in public, creating gowns for premieres, parties and awards ceremonies that linked glamour directly to studio power.

Even in its early years, the Oscars projected spectacle, with Hollywood’s social elite arriving in sumptuous furs, jewels and sweeping evening gowns. Designers working across stage, screen and society helped define this emerging language of modern glamour. Figures such as Italy’s Elsa Schiaparelli and Paris’ Coco Chanel shaped Hollywood wardrobes through bold silhouettes, inventive drapery and a distinctly modern sense of elegance. Their influence remains profound. Indeed, the Victoria and Albert Museum’s 2026 exhibition Schiaparelli: Fashion Becomes Art underscores Schiaparelli’s continuing importance, tracing her impact from the 1920s onward and affirming her place among the most original designers of the modern era.

The Modern Red Carpet: From the Oscars to the Met Gala

The transformation of the red carpet into a global theater of power dressing accelerated through the latter half of the 20th century. Jane Fonda's 1972 Oscars look—an all-black Yves Saint Laurent pantsuit—is one of the most famous fashion choices in Oscar history. Fonda later explained that she chose a simple black Yves Saint Laurent pantsuit because it fit the “somber times” and because she did not want to appear in a lavish evening dress while the Vietnam War was still ongoing.

The clothes worn to events such as the Oscars and the Golden Globes consistently receive intense worldwide media scrutiny, making their red carpets an international product placement area of great importance to fashion designers. The Met Gala extended this logic further still, merging high fashion, cultural commentary and celebrity into a single spectacular event that functions, in many ways, as a direct descendant of the European masked ball.

Beneath the spectacle, however, the red carpet offers something older and more revealing: a public ritual in which clothing announces ambition, belonging and authority. Long after crowns, court dress and formal sumptuary codes have faded, the desire to make power visible has endured.

Interested in more celebrity-inspired memorabilia and jewelry? Explore our red carpet-worthy collections today!