The Academy Awards ceremony is the most popular award-giving ceremony in media culture. This article explores the efforts for turning the event into a commercially profitable television product by exploring the public relations activities that shaped it during the 1950s. In doing so, these findings debunk the mythologized conception of television’s longstanding interest in broadcasting the event as allegedly colliding with Hollywood’s resistance to entering the new medium. It argues that the Oscarcast emerged from a trial-and-error strategy, consolidating through the professionalization of public relations tactics that included the year-round communication of activities related to the ceremony, the construction of a press pavilion, the exploitation of a fashion angle to attract female audiences, and a subsequent broadening of their audience strategies to expand its appeal to sponsors.

Fashion has historically relied on visual culture for representation and promotion. Since the early days of film, moving images mediated culture, functioning as entertainment and style guides for working-class women. The fashion and media industries have crossed paths ever since. Far from stopping this dynamic, the advent of the Internet garnered new opportunities to produce and disseminate fashion-related audio-visual content. In recent years, media companies targeting younger audiences began producing short Web series for free streaming on company websites and platforms such as YouTube. This chapter locates fashion newsfilms and Web series within journalistic discourse through their connection to broadcasting and the printed press. Departing from archival sources and resting on the notion of glocalisation, it argues for the historical role of fashion newsfilms as key to a geopolitical reconfiguration that demarcated the centre and periphery, positioning the West at the centre of an imagined global fashion and beauty culture. In so doing, this chapter situates fashion Web series as the materialisation of early aspirations to expand modern consumer culture within a complex matrix of emerging, dominant, and residual cultural flows, co-opting countercultural discourses of fashion, dress, and beauty and reducing them to branding tags for corporate media products.

The Academy Awards’ red-carpet is the most prominent fashion show in media culture. Fashion on the Red Carpet investigates the historical liaison between Hollywood and fashion institutions, to describe how public relations campaigns and the media articulate fashion discourses around the Oscars. The power-shift towards television, the emergence of celebrity culture, the post-war reactivation of transatlantic trade, the growth of fashion journalism, and the increasing circulation of designer names in the media, are converging factors leading to the institutionalisation of the red-carpet as a fashion event in its own right.Departing from archival sources, and tracing discourses of fashion, stardom, and celebrity surrounding Hollywood and the Oscars, this fascinating book explains how the red-carpet became a marquee for the endorsement of high-end fashion brands.

This introductory essay calls for a new fashion media history informed by truly interdisciplinary scholarship, nuanced in both fashion and media studies. It reflects upon the ways in which the study of fashion as communication and fashion journalism have been addressed, arguing that fashion studies has laid out a western backbone of this history that invites and deserves to be confirmed and contested. It encourages future authors to find those fashion media discourses, voices, and practices that brought attention to fashion and dress moving past the so-called ‘fashion bibles’ to unravel discourses reaching popular audiences, underrepresented minorities, unlisted geographies, and subcultures.