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Oscar: Fashion's night
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March 23, 2001: 10:25 a.m. ET
Top designers vying to dress Hollywood's biggest stars
By Hope Hamashige
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NEW YORK (CNNfn) - For one week in March, Los Angeles becomes the fashion capital of the world. Designers from New York, Paris, Milan and London have transported trunkloads of their most glamorous gowns, wraps and accessories to the West Coast and set up makeshift showrooms in hotel suites across L.A.
 Over the next several days, the suites will be abuzz with activity as celebrity stylists and, in some cases the celebrities themselves, comb through the offerings searching for the right dress to wear to the Oscars.
For fashion designers, Oscar Night has become a night like none other. It's like the Olympics of glam, and for a lucky few, one perfectly positioned photograph carries more marketing power than a string of well-placed ads in the pages of Vogue Magazine.
It's not just the dress designers, either any more. Handbag makers, shoe designers, jewelers and make up artists are starting to get into the game, too.
And as dressmakers descend on L.A. for a frenzied week of parties, schmoozing, meetings with stars and stylists, last minute shopping excursions for the perfect accessories to show off their gowns, they all have one common goal: convince one starlet, one who is likely to be photographed, to pick one of their creations to wear to the big show.
Amid all the activity, however, is an underlying tension because the designers don't know whether their efforts will pay off big or whether they are going to completely strike out. Most of the stars won't decide what to wear until the very last minute, until they have tried on dozens of dresses.
So, is it worth all the effort and expense they will occur over the next few days? You better believe it is.
A picture is worth many thousands of orders
The right star walking down the red carpet in just the right dress can become the picture seen round the world the morning after the Oscar broadcast. Ask Pamela Dennis about dressing Geena Davis for the Oscars a few years back and she still struggles to express how important a moment like that can be.
 "It was incredible. It was a huge thing. And it seen all over the world, not just in the United States," said Dennis.
The entertainment and fashion press twittered over the sheer (OK, it was see-through) gown and the next morning it became the dress seen round the world.
CNN.com: Understated elegance expected at Sunday's ceremony.
"After that, I remember I went to the factories in Italy and everyone was saying to me: Geena Davis," said Dennis.
Dennis was young, but not an unknown designer at the time. She had a following in Hollywood, due in large part to Jamie Lee Curtis, who was, and remains, a huge fan of Dennis' clothing from her earliest days. But that first moment in the spotlight at the Oscars was like none other in her career and helped catapult her to international fashion fame.
"It is impossible to put a dollar value on it," said Dennis of getting the stars to turn out in your clothes, mention your name on the red carpet and have those photos appear in the fashion press. "I pinch my cheek every time I think about what it has done for me."
What it is has done for her is this: Her styles were soon gracing the pages of major fashion magazines. The boutiques and high-end department stores like Neiman Marcus came calling, helping to skyrocket her sales into the multi-millions.
Last year, New York-based Pegasus Apparel Group, an umbrella company that brands smaller designers, bought a stake in her company, which will help fuel her expansion even further.
Dennis' designs are considered an institution at the Hollywood awards shows where she regularly outfits stalwarts like Bette Midler and fresh faces such as Liv Tyler. She'll be in Los Angeles again this year, joining the other hopeful designers in the marathon of selling, fitting, altering and accessorizing that goes on every night into the morning during Oscar week.
Rising to the occasion
It didn't used to be like this. In Oscar's earliest days, fashion was a far humbler affair. The stars often wore gowns they pulled out of their closets or were sewn by the studio costume designers who also made the dresses for the movies. At least one leading lady, Joanne Woodward, made her own frock from a pattern when she won the Best Actress award for "The Three Faces of Eve" in 1958.
At some point in the last five to 10 years, depending on who you ask, the expectations about fashion at the Oscars changed. Celebrities, who didn't always dress well for the occasion, were suddenly expected to look picture-perfect on Oscar night.
As pressure mounted for the celebrities to go all out on Oscar night, the  press began quizzing the nominees and perennial style-setters that now common question: "So Julia, who are you wearing tonight?" Savvy designers recognized this was an opportunity to get their name out and have simply risen to the occasion.
"It is a relatively recent phenomenon," said Maggie Murray, director of the museum at the Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising in Los Angeles. "More and more designers come every year, take over entire hotels, to try to be part of it."
This year, Randolph Duke showed his collection in Los Angeles a week and a half before Oscar night, a not-so-subtle reminder to the stars and the stylists who dress them they should consider wearing one of his designs to the awards.
Most of the designers take a more low-key approach to Oscar week. They send sketches, sometimes directly to the stars, but more often to the key stylists in Hollywood, who help the stars dress for the evening. And then they let everyone know where they can come see the gowns in person.
Ground zero: L'Ermitage
As she has for the past seven years, Dennis is setting up her temporary workspace in a pair of suites at the L'Ermitage Hotel in Beverly Hills, which has become ground zero for the biggest name designers in town for awards. Each one of them shells out a lot of money to make the trip. Dennis says she regularly spends upward of $30,000 during those four days in Los Angeles.
Others come out earlier and spend a lot more money. It is not uncommon for some designers to spend more than $60,000 in what may be a vain attempt to get a celebrity to shimmy into a dress and show it off on the red carpet entrance to the Shrine Auditorium.
It's a real gamble. It's a lot money up front, but when a designer hits, the publicity is worth much more than the tens of thousands they paid to be there. For designers still trying to build their name recognition among American consumers, a good showing at the Oscars can be a career changing moment.
New York designer Christina Perrin is making her first Oscar trip this year. She, too, will be at the L'Ermitage rubbing elbows with the fashion elite and hoping to make that connection with just the right stylist. Perrin, a young rising star, already knows what a major star in a majorly glamorous gown on the pages of a major fashion magazine can mean for her business.
The phones started ringing at her New York studio with orders after Charlize Theron, strutting down the red carpet, was photographed at the Golden Globes in a black Perrin gown.
The Golden Globes are big exposure for the designers. These days, however, nothing touches the Oscars in terms of the marketing power for the fashion business.
Everybody can use the boost
Even established designers -- the Versaces, Armanis, Calvin Kleins and Chanels of the world -- will see a jump in sales after a good showing at the Oscars.
"People see these clothes at the Oscars and it doesn't mean people in middle America are going to buy a gown. But they may go get some perfume or the stockings made by that designer," said Jimmy Newcomer, an instructor at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York.
Renowned Italian designer Roberto Cavalli touched down in Los Angeles more than a week before the awards and has been holding court in the L'Ermitage in the hope of making that right connection. A known commodity in his native Italy, Cavalli is hoping to raise his profile among American consumers by scoring big this week in L.A.
Since he touched down a week ago, he has gone to a movie premiere and several pre-Oscar fashion parties, and met with several stylists, who he hopes will pitch one of his frocks to a major star. Cavalli probably has a better chance than most newcomers to the Oscar circuit at landing a really big star, given his prominence in Italy and the fact that many Hollywood-types like Sandra Bullock already own clothes he has designed.
He hasn't yet scheduled a fitting, which is usually the last thing the star asks for after making a last minute decision on which gown to wear, but he is sure he will.
"It is very good for the business. When you are lucky the picture goes across the world. This is the reason why we are all here," he said. 
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