“Fashion is part of the daily air and it changes all the time, with all the events,” said Diana Vreeland, editor-in-chief of US Vogue throughout the Sixties. “You can even see the approaching of a revolution in clothes. You can see and feel everything in clothes.”

At January’s Golden Globes you could certainly see one resounding message in the clothes on the red carpet. Whether it will lead to a revolution is yet to be seen, but the Time’s Up suggestion that guests wear black in solidarity against sexual harassment was taken up almost unanimously. The result was a sartorial statement of feminist social responsibility not seen on the red carpet before – a wall of black that said women, celebrity or not, need to be addressed as equals. For the Baftas this Sunday, stars have been urged once again to wear black.

The film industry rolled out the first red carpet at the world’s inaugural film premiere, 1922’s Robin Hood. The Oscars didn’t use a red carpet until 1961 and shots of the guests outside weren’t broadcast until 1964. Stars began to use the space to assert their personalities through their clothes. But it wasn’t until the Golden Globes in 1994, when Joan Rivers hosted rolling red carpet coverage for E!, that the question, “Who are you wearing?” was asked. Faced with TV and tabloid coverage, and later, online judgment, film stars gradually began opting for more conservative looks.

In recent years, the red carpet has been used as an alternative form of advertising, with stars often paid to wear certain clothes. This says something about the status of the women involved: whether it makes them power brokers or commodities, though, is up for debate. If any deals were struck before this year’s Golden Globes, they did not lessen the message, delivered four years after the Ask Her More campaign first pressed for women on red carpets to be quizzed about more than just their clothes. Will momentum continue through other awards ceremonies and beyond? It will be interesting to see but already it’s allowed starlets to evolve into spokespeople with a powerful platform.

So what happened along the way? Meet the women who first challenged the tyranny of the red carpet.

How the red carpet became the home of feminist statements