Unforgettable Dresses book deconstructs history’s enduring frocks

The Golden Globes on Sunday night will kick off awards season, and as usual the morning-after chatter in offices and talk shows won’t be about which actress won an award — it will be about what she was wearing.Chances are, you may not remember who won an award but you’ll remember a spectacular dress and who wore it. Who can forget Julia Roberts at the 2001 Oscars in that black Valentino gown with white stripes? Or Halle Berry at the 2002 Oscars wearing the Elie Saab satin and floral embroidered sheer gown?
That’s the power of a single dress. It can leave a searing imprint on our memory. A lush new coffee-table book, 100 Unforgettable Dresses by Hal Rubenstein, the fashion director of InStyle, offers a look at famous dresses that mesmerized the world. Part history lesson, with interviews with the designers and dollops of insider gossip on how these dresses became imprinted in pop culture, the book chronicles dresses not just from the red carpets but also from the worlds of comedy, music, film, royalty and fashion.
“Every single dress in the book has a story. There are prettier dresses that are not in the book but if it didn’t have a story, I wasn’t interested,” said Rubenstein on the phone from New York. “These are dresses that affect us collectively as a society in terms of how we dress, how we look at beauty and how certain dresses made certain individuals stars.” Take the first image in the book. Back in 1994, Elizabeth Hurley was known only as Hugh Grant’s girlfriend until she stepped out on the red carpet on his arm for the London premier of his film Four Weddings and a Funeral dressed in a Gianni Versace gown strategically held together by gold safety pins. Rubenstein describes how thereafter the gown and Hurly were “inseparable, incredible, combustible, derisible and ultimately globally inescapable.”
But while a single dress can take someone from the sidelines to stardom, the formula is not one that is simple or straightforward. For a dress to become unforgettable, there must be a confluence of several factors.“Calvin Klein told me it has to be the right dress on the right woman at the right time,” says Rubenstein. “Look at the dress Halle Berry wore — if Reese Witherspoon had worn that, it would not have the same effect.”Also some dresses might have had a public outing or two before it landed on the woman who gave it iconic status.
Remember that green palm froid sheer Versace gown with navel-plunging neckline that Jennifer Lopez wore to the 2000 Grammys? It had been strutted down the runway on supermodel Amber Valleta to virtually no fanfare. Even the designer Donatella Versace wore the dress and no one batted an eyelash.