Actually, the couture collections are tailor-made for about 500 people in the world who have the means or the connections to get an $80,000 dress, and the rest is just ballyhoo to sell the cheaper commercial stuff.

True, one or two houses will specially make dresses for the Oscars, as Chanel did for Penelope Cruz for the Golden Globes.

But the red carpet is really a concession to middle American tastes; if you stopped to analyze it long enough, if you added up the number of ruched or beaded dresses trucking down the carpet, you wouldn’t have Paris or even Hollywood. You’d have the suburbs of Detroit on a good night.