When the flashing cameras are gone and the curtains are closed, where do all the red carpet gowns go?
“Those days of a gown being packed away and forgotten about for many years and rediscovered are sadly gone,” Lucy Bishop, a handbags and fashion specialist at Sotheby’s, told CNN.
“Now, often when a gown is worn on the red carpet, there is usually a plan put in place for where that gown will end up.”
A rare few are gifted to or bought by the A-list wearer — for instance, Kim Kardashian has an archive of many of her Met Gala looks, while Zendaya purchased her show-stopping 1996 black, John Galliano-designed Givenchy gown from fashion’s biggest night in 2024 — a trend that was more popular decades ago.
Bishop told CNN that Nicole Kidman’s 1997 Oscars dress — a chartreuse number from Galliano — was a piece that “changed the trajectory of red-carpet dressing” and marked the beginning of brands “very publicly partnering with a celebrity and sort of officially dressing them for the red carpet.”
Prior to that time, it was more commonplace for the celebrity to keep the gown they wore on the carpet, and, according to CNN, sometimes those gowns would even be sold or given away.
Today, most ensembles are put in storage or on display in galleries, while some are auctioned for hefty sums.
“Most of the time it gets returned and is stored in the designer’s archives,” stylist Tanya Gill previously told Vanity Fair in 2017, although there are rare exceptions when designers will “gladly gift the gown,” Gill added.
“It’s like Cinderella, you wear it to the ball, and at midnight it has to go back.”
According to Cleveland Museum of Art’s chief conservator Sarah Scaturro, the gowns undergo cleaning, since the person who donned the garment “might have on body lotions, oils, perfumes, makeup.” She told CNN that “even if you don’t see that right away … over time, these materials and stains can actually start to oxidize and they will start changing the color of the fabric, and maybe even the texture.”
Sometimes the pieces are dry cleaned, while other times they are laundered or just vacuumed and dusted off, depending on the fabric and style.
Most of the time, the gowns are then placed into specialty storage, whether that be the archives at a fashion house or a private facility, CNN reported.
But they aren’t just placed in boxes to collect dust.
“It’s really a case-by-case basis about how each particular item is mounted or stored,” Julie Ann Clauss, the founder of The Wardrobe, told the outlet.
“So some things hang, some things are boxed, and some things have to be mounted, meaning they’re on, like a dress form, because these things are designed to be worn. They’re not really designed to hang or to be laying flat.”
The Wardrobe is in possession of an estimated 100,000 garments from an array of fashion designers, precious cargo that requires precise storage conditions like low light and ideal humidity and temperature levels for preservation.
These pieces typically only leave the Los Angeles or New York warehouses if they are selected to be worn on the red carpet again or shown in an exhibition.
To get the gowns on the road, however, is its own difficult fete.
Clauss told CNN about a time she needed to transport pieces of clothing that were “these three-dimensional, huge things, but fine beading, heavy crystals on really delicate stretch tulle fabric.”
“I was, like: ‘Guys, we can’t put these in a box … ’” she recalled. “They need custom mounts made so they’re stable flying internationally, and then they need to have a crate built around it. You see these crates and they’re tremendous, sometimes they’re, like, 7 feet tall for a dress.”
Some gowns, however, don’t even make it off the carpet or out of the event, such as Tyla’s Balmain sand gown, which was cut off of her at the end of the evening after last year’s Met Gala.
