The Six Fashion Brands That Dominated the Golden Globes Red Carpet

After dual labor strikes last year, the Hollywood awards show red carpet roared back to life Sunday at the Golden Globes, which drew 9.4 million viewers on CBS, 50 percent more than the 6.3 million in 2023, according to Nielsen. Luxury sales may be seeing a slowdown, but deep-pocketed fashion houses still ruled, with Dior alone dressing 19 stars. Here’s a scorecard of the six brands that led with style and numbers.

Dior Dominates

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Natalie Portman in Dior Haute Couture
Natalie Portman in Dior couture.

Luxury market leader LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton’s fashion brand juggernaut, which has tripled in size in less than seven years, was front-and-center, dressing 19 celebrities on Sunday night.

Natalie Portman nabbed WWD’s Style Award for Best-Dressed in a Dior Haute Couture evening dress that was a garden of delights with black tulle embroidered with an impressionist landscape of micro-flowers and vermicelli. “It’s like hundreds of hours of work, so it’s really lucky to get to wear it,” the “May December” actress told WWD on the red carpet.

Rosamund Pike was a best-dressed close second, channeling her character in “Saltburn” in a Dior Haute Couture tea-length lace bustier dress from fall-winter 2019 with a tattoo effect on black mesh sleeves, and a Philip Treacy face mask, which she added to disguise an injured chin from a holiday skiing accident. “We talked about a filter that wasn’t on an iPhone,” the Golden Globe winner explained on the red carpet of coming up with the mask. “‘Saltburn’ gives you license to be a little extreme and not play by the rules.”

Showing a more minimalist side of Dior women’s artistic director Maria Grazia Chiuri’s oeuvre, “Beef” Golden Globe winner Ali Wong chose a goddess-like, long, draped white silk crepe dress held up by a braid in the back.

Dior men’s artistic director Kim Jones dressed 12 guests, including “Succession” winner Kieran Culkin in a black silk wool peak-lapel tuxedo and black embroidered shirt. “I very much like it a lot. Any excuse not to wear a tie is great for me,” he told WWD, adding humorously of his colorful beaded friendship bracelets, “I like to steal bracelets from my kids and other peoples’ kids.” Working the creative black tie trend, he also rocked mismatched pink and purple socks.

Louis Vuitton’s New Day

Emma Stone in custom Louis Vuitton
Emma Stone in custom Louis Vuitton.

The Golden Globes marked the debut of musician and men’s creative director Pharrell Williams’ first red carpet looks for Louis Vuitton and the continuation of women’s creative director Nicolas Ghesquière’s decade-long role, cemented by the extension of his contract, first reported by WWD.

Globes winner Emma Stone, styled by Petra Flannery, wore a custom deep-V gown with flower embellishments and Louis Vuitton high jewelry pieces by Francesca Amfitheatrof. (The embroidery was a mix of different materials: sequins, silk and metal threads, silver glass tubes and strass, and the dress took 800 hours of work to make.)

Oprah Winfrey cheered on “The Color Purple” in a custom curve-hugging, purple sequin gown with geometric embroidery that took more than 600 hours to make.

“Saltburn’s” salty star Barry Keoghan sported a red-hot Damier patterned Louis Vuitton suit with a punk edge from the men’s spring 2004 collection with loads of jewelry, including pearl buttons and a pearl wallet chain.

Colman Domingo, who portrayed Bayard Rustin, the openly gay civil rights activist and adviser to Martin Luther King Jr. in the film “Rustin,” wore a directional black tie look of an elegant Nehru style jacket, flared pants and brooches that had special meaning. “Nehru was a colleague of Bayard Rustin,” he told WWD of the first prime minister of India following its independence, another trailblazer for democracy. Domingo was also wearing an agate stone ring that belonged to Rustin, adding, “I feel like his energy is with me.”

Prada Flexes

Hunter Schafer in Prada
Hunter Schafer in Prada.

Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons have been at the top of their game the past couple of runway seasons with their juxtaposition of hard and soft, romantic and tailored, and that filtered down to some of Sunday’s most winning looks.

Styled by Danielle Goldberg, Golden Globe winner Ayo Edebiri was a standout in a fiery red strapless voile Prada tea-length technical satin and voile dress with a floating reflective organza train in the same spirit as the women’s spring 2024 runway collection. The look was finished with pointy, dyed-to-match heels. She also sported one of the newest-looking hairstyles of the evening, a sleek bob.

Hunter Schafer’s pink silk gazar and technical voile column dress was another take off the runway collection, with layered flounces that caught the breeze on the red carpet on the unusually cold day in Los Angeles.

Meanwhile, Brie Larson wore a ladylike wisteria technical satin dress with a sweetheart neckline and wide swing skirt, fitted to perfection.

Going her own way, and representing Prada’s more uniform side of dressing, was Bella Ramsey in a light blue blouson jacket and gray trousers, both in natté stretch, worn with the brand’s bestselling Chelsea monolith boots.

And Willem Dafoe, whose relationship with the house stretches back to 1996, when he modeled for a campaign photographed by Glenn Luchford, wore a single-breasted suit of black technical fabric and a white poplin shirt as timeless now as it was then.

Schiaparelli Shines

Natasha Lyonne in Schiaparelli
Natasha Lyonne in Schiaparelli.

In less than five years American designer Daniel Roseberry has reinvented the historic house of Schiaparelli with his modern take on surrealism, and buoyed the Diego Della Valle-owned brand’s fortunes with Hollywood’s help.

Roseberry dressed Dua Lipa in a custom black velvet bustier dress with trompe l’oeil gilded bones inspired by Elsa Schiaparelli’s collaboration with Salvador Dali in 1938, and Carey Mulligan donned a strapless black and white gown with bodice ruching evoking a spine, recreating an original Schiaparelli design from fall 1949.

Natasha Lyonne chose a custom bustier dress inspired by the spring 2023 couture collection, fully covered in ecru glass bugle beads and fringe tubes.

“I love the history of Schiaparelli, Elsa Schiaparelli and Surrealism as a movement,” Lyonne told WWD on the carpet. “What could be more surreal than all of these shenanigans we involve ourselves in? It’s an honor to wear this outfit. We’re in the business of the arts, and wearing this art piece is a special thing.”

The red carpet showing followed Roseberry’s trip to Los Angeles last October, where he was feted at a Neiman Marcus cocktail party by Jennifer Lopez, Angela Bassett, Regina King, Lyonne and many more Hollywood friends who have supported the brand.

“You know, we’ve never paid a single person to wear it. It’s just incredible that people have gravitated to it so much. I’m just humbled by that,” Roseberry said at the time. “I think of this as the service industry. So, for me, it’s about serving an artist in a moment where they have to be highly performative, highly vulnerable, highly out there. And that’s what I love to do. You know, [Alexander] McQueen said one time, ‘I don’t go to therapy, because the collections are my therapy.’ And you had the sense that sometimes designers are working out their own personal things. I couldn’t feel less like that at all. For me it’s about the client. It’s about the star. It’s about serving a moment. And that’s what I hope people feel and what I hope they’re responding to.”

Gucci Turns the Page

Taylor Swift in Gucci

Under new creative director Sabato De Sarno, Gucci had a lot to prove on his first awards season red carpet, namely if it could still seduce Hollywood with a simpler, sportier, younger aesthetic that couldn’t be more different than predecessor Alessandro Michele’s maximalist fashion fantasia. (And on the heels of Artémis, the investment company owned by Gucci parent company Kering, acquiring a majority stake in Hollywood talent agency CAA, too.)

The answer was “yes,” as one of the world’s biggest box office and music stars, Taylor Swift, showed up in a fierce, serpentine-green sequined Gucci dress.

Styled by Elizabeth Saltzman, shooting star Julia Garner, a face of the brand, chose a chic Gucci floor-length allover sequin and strass embroidered dress with a plunging neckline and high waist. “He’s just such a beautiful artist, but more importantly he’s such a beautiful person inside,” she told WWD of De Sarno. “I’ve gotten to know him these last few months and I’m so thrilled to be working with him.”

Mark Ronson, who produced five songs for “Barbie,” and mixed the music for De Sarno’s first women’s Gucci runway show in September, also stopped by with his wife Grace Gummer to chat about his friend. “He had such a great idea to remix this Mina song ‘Ancora,’ and now he picked this lovely ensemble for me and Grace loved this dress so we’re double Gucci,” said Ronson, wearing a custom black tuxedo with round interlocking G buttons. “That was the first time I’d done music for a fashion show and I loved working with Sabato, so we’re going to do more.”

Armani’s Streak

Margot Robbie in Armani Privi
Margot Robbie in Armani Privé.

Giorgio Armani changed the red carpet — and fashion —forever when he dressed Jodie Foster at the 1990 Oscars when she won for “The Accused,” as well as dressing Michelle Pfeiffer, Tom Cruise, Billy Crystal, Denzel Washington, Julia Roberts, and many more for the ceremony. WWD put Pfeiffer on the cover and called the night “The Armani Awards.”

Armani’s pioneering and longtime celebrity liaison Wanda McDaniel, a former reporter from Missouri who was married to Hollywood producer Al Ruddy, remembered watching the 1989 ceremony on TV at Swifty Lazar’s Oscar viewing party, and realizing everyone looked gorgeous there and terrible on the red carpet. A light bulb went off and the rest was history.

Bringing loads of publicity to Armani in the U.S. and around the world, that game-changing 1990 Oscars made designers and stars inseparable, locked in a mutually beneficial relationship that gave rise to the role of Hollywood stylist, and luxury brands’ investment in celebrity ambassadors, the red carpet, and the entertainment industry itself.

More than 30 years later, Armani is still a carpet go-to for devotees Matt Damon, Martin Scorsese and Robert De Niro. What was surprising on Sunday, however, was how many others chose the OG of Hollywood glamour, namely belle of the ball Margot Robbie, who everyone had been forecasting to wear Schiaparelli, or maybe Chanel.

Styled by Andrew Mukamal, Robbie chose a Barbie pink Armani Privé gown and matching tulle boa inspired by the 1977 SuperStar Barbie doll.

Selena Gomez, meanwhile, went with an Armani Privé ruby red cutout dress with pleated skirt and crystal embroidered flowers. And Amanda Seyfried donned a strapless Armani Privé velvet column with a dramatic black and pink crystal bow at the neckline.

Armani dressed 15 stars, including next-gen “May December” heartthrob Charles Melton in a made-to-measure navy double-breasted peak-lapel tuxedo, proving that the designer’s Hollywood reign is firmly established for the future.

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Launch Gallery: Top 6 Designers That Dominated the Red Carpet at the Golden Globes

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