Awards season is upon us, with the Golden Globes this past weekend and Oscar nominees to be announced Jan. 13. The focus is on the shows where the winners collect their trophies and lecture their lessers. But the real action is the walk down the red carpet—the shoes, the hair and the eternal question, “Who are you wearing?”
While most will look at the Harry Winston jewels or Ralph Lauren dresses, some of us will direct our gaze a little lower down. Even without Joan Rivers holding court, the red-carpet extravaganzas are the only nights when my humble industry looms large. Walking down red-stained concrete wouldn’t have the same cachet.
The first recorded use of red carpet—actually crimson robes laid on the ground—was when Clytemnestra welcomed her husband, Agamemnon, back from the Trojan War just before she murdered him—not what we usually mean by “the red-carpet treatment.”
Later red carpets became synonymous with royalty—and in the 1920s, they began to be used for movie premieres. It makes sense: Who’s more royal in America than movie stars?
Most red carpeting is made in Dalton, Ga., where the modern tufted textile industry was invented. In the early 1900s Catherine Evans Whitener made tufted bedspreads and recruited other women to help. By the 1950s, the tufting cottage industry she founded shifted into tufted carpet. By the 1970s northern Georgia became the Silicon Valley of carpeting, leading the U.S. in millionaires per capita.
At $11.4 billion a year, the carpet and rug industry is about the same size as the 2019 U.S. domestic box office. Can you name a single carpet brand? I didn’t think so. Don’t bother looking for the carpet critic in your local paper. There’s no carpet caucus in Congress, no Yelp for yarn, no price supports for plush pile.
Carpet is used to the insults. Carpetbagger. Carpet bombing. Who doesn’t dread being called on the carpet? Where do problems get swept? The needling and slurs keep coming, and carpeting takes them lying down. Every step is a crushing defeat.
Carpet needs no complicated user’s manual and can easily change styles with the times. From various widths to multiple sizes of commercial tiles, carpeting stretches as much as any worn-out character actor. The brave may die only once, but carpet has been dyed a thousand times. Don’t blame the pink shag for how it was made—blame its maker or, better, the indulgent parents who let a 6-year-old choose her own carpet.
What do our carpets ask of us? Wall-to-wall support requires a good vacuum with a nice beater bar. So take off your shoes, lie down on the floor, and show your carpet some of the love it gives you.
I hope that the sashaying starlets and strutting hunks take a moment to think kindly of all of the little people who helped make, sell and install the carpet that supports them on their way up. They will surely be looking for some underfoot comfort on their way down.
Mr. Weiss is a Pittsburgh carpet salesman.
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"Hollywood" - Google News
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In Praise of the Hollywood Yarn - Wall Street Journal
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