Giulana Rancic’s Retirement Signals That The Red Carpet Is Officially Dead

Giuliana Rancic announced over the weekend that she is retiring from E!’s Live from the Red Carpet after 20 years of ooh-ing and ah-ing over celebrities’s designer duds. While her announcement might simply seem like another career change for a famous TV host, it’s actually indicative of something larger: the final death knell for the red carpet as we once knew it.

While film critics and Tinseltown insiders have been nervously watching the dwindling awards show ratings this past year, another Hollywood tradition has been swiftly going under right before our eyes. Celebrities no longer need the red carpet, and their fans no longer care. Carefully curated Instagram stories showing dress fittings, sometimes with the designer RIGHT THERE IN THE ROOM, have replaced the need to drop a designer’s name on a cable TV broadcast. E! might be hoping that the newly hired Laverne Cox can inject some chic energy into Live from the Red Carpet in 2022, but it won’t be enough. Rancic’s retirement, coming on the heels of fellow Live from the Red Carpet host Ryan Seacrest’s and Jason Kennedy’s exits, means the red carpet is officially dead.

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The glitz and glamour of the red carpet no longer feels exciting, but like a relic of a bygone era — because that’s exactly what it is. 99 years ago, a red carpet was rolled out in front of the famed Egyptian Theatre in Los Angeles to mark the 1922 premiere of Douglas Fairbanks’s epic film Robin Hood. The spectacle caught on, and soon red carpets were synonymous with Hollywood premieres, one of the only times the public could catch a glimpse of otherwise elusive movie stars in the flesh. In 1961, the Oscars adopted the tradition, and a few years later broadcasters got the clever idea to film celebrity arrivals to the awards show. The pageantry of the red carpet helped frame movie stars as living idols, gracing us mortals with their picture perfect presences in this limited, theatrical set up.

The red carpet also became a place for high fashion to reach the masses. Major designers could loan actors and actresses sharply-cut tuxes, custom gowns, or expensive jewelry in exchange for free promotion. It was a win-win for both parties, really. Celebrities could cement their star status and designers could set themselves up as aspirational brands for the middle class to scrimp and save for.

In the 1990s, a cable network called E! started camping out on the red carpet for hours before the awards shows actually started. Comedy legend Joan Rivers undercut the self-serious solemnity of the red carpet with her caustic wit, and viewers in suburban America could feel like they were getting some sort of insight into how Hollywood really worked. If the red carpet was supposed to be a controlled place for normies to spot celebs, then E!’s Live from the Red Carpet made viewers feel even closer to the action. It was as up close and intimate as a fan could be. That is, until the rise of paparazzi culture and catty gossip blogs in the early Aughts, which in turn begat the rise social media — enabling stars to once again demonstrate as much control over their personal presentation and “brand” as possible.

While COVID-19 closed movie theaters and decimated box office revenues, it also changed the way awards shows and premieres were handled. Over the last year and some change, coronavirus precautions meant that stars couldn’t convene in the same space. So if viewers tuned into E!’s Live from the Red Carpet, they weren’t greeted with Hollywood spectacle, but instead, a series of Zoom calls. Fashion houses still managed to make an impact, however. Stars were able to post flattering professional portraits on Instagram and Twitter, tagging the designers and stylists who made it all happen. Pandemic or not, social media proved that stars didn’t need the red carpet to reach fans and designers didn’t need it for promotion.

Worse, if you were part of the rapidly dwindling audience that tuned into E!’s Live from the Red Carpet in 2021, you’d be greeted by a very different show than in the heyday of Joan Rivers. While the original Live from the Red Carpet acted something like a court jester, pointing out Hollywood’s hypocrisies and mocking stars to their face, today’s version morphed into panel of fashion experts toothlessly fawning over stars. Rivers’s infamous penchant for cruelty is out of style in 2021 — and our cultural swerve away from meanness should be celebrated! — but in its stead is slavish devotion to stars. It’s not wholly honest, and worse, it’s not interesting.

As if realizing that the end was nigh, E!’s most famous red carpet host Ryan Seacrest quietly left the gig during the pandemic. Seacrest’s backup Jason Kennedy followed suit in March. And now Giuliana Rancic, the last of the iconic red carpet hosts left at E!, is abandoning ship, too. E!’s Live from the Red Carpet might keep going, but the magic is gone. The red carpet, as a concept, is dead.