By Owen Reyes · Republished 2026-05-20 · Originally reported by Richard Horgan on FishbowlLA, 2011
In October 2011 The Hollywood Reporter launched a fashion column — another sign of how central red-carpet style had become to the entertainment-trade business.
Then
THR announced ‘FASHtrack,’ a print and online fashion column. FishbowlLA, in its way, led with the headshot of contributing editor Elizabeth Snead, joking that the late Stieg Larsson could not have drawn up a better tattoo than the one on the reporter’s arm.
The column paired Snead with blog editor Merle Ginsberg and THR style editor Carol McColgin. Ginsberg framed the move with some history: she said she had started covering awards red-carpet fashion for WWD in 1992, ‘practically inventing the genre,’ and that Hollywood and the fashion business had come to depend on each other.
Snead, who had been writing a personal blog and working for Deadline.com after stints at the LA Times and USA Today, would focus on awards-show fashion. She told FishbowlLA her tattoo derived from a Nicolas Poussin painting and its Latin inscription, ‘Et in Arcadia ego.’
Now
Ginsberg’s claim — that Hollywood and fashion had become inseparable — only grew truer. Red-carpet coverage, designer dressing and celebrity-style journalism became a major commercial engine for the entertainment trades, drawing advertising and audiences that hard industry news increasingly struggled to match.
Dedicated style verticals and awards-season fashion coverage became standard across The Hollywood Reporter and its rivals, and the genre Ginsberg traced to her early-1990s WWD work matured into a full beat with its own editors and franchises.
The post is a small marker of that shift: an entertainment trade once defined by deal-making formally deciding that fashion deserved a column of its own.
Original report archived on the Wayback Machine.