Hamish Bowles: The December 2000 cover of Vogue looked as daring and sexy as any other, yet was revolutionary. The cover model perched atop a plush red sofa in a red silk dress with her red curls falling loosely down her back and lush red lipstick accentuating her pout. Yet the groundbreaking nature of this particular cover had little to do with a strikingly vibrant monochrome palette. It was the fact that the model was famed actress Nicole Kidman, posing in character to promote her latest film " Moulin Rouge ".

Mark Holgate: It was just the growing emphasis on celebrity covers that actors, musicians, cultural figures, could wear fashion. They give you a different narrative about fashion. 

Ivan Shaw: I think the producers in the movie studios understood that, the power of the magazines, and the power of fashion to help promote their movies you know, help box office. 

Hamish Bowles: A Vogue cover story dedicated to the promotion of a film's release marked a notable departure from the publications proclivity to keeping the spotlight on fashion. How did this one decision open Vogue up to politics, sports, and above all else, Hollywood. And collapsed the partition between the exclusivity of high fashion and the rest of the world.

Welcome to In Vogue: the 2000s, the podcast about the decade that ushered in a new millennium and redefined boundaries in fashion and society. Alongside fashion leaders, cultural icons, and Vogue's editorial team, we'll dissect the decades most impactful style moments and how they've shaped our culture today.

Anna Wintour: I'm Anna Wintour. 

Hamish Bowles: And I'm your host, Hamish Bowles. Vogue helped elevate the status of the film "Moulin Rouge", which went on to win two Academy Awards for art direction and costume design. In turn, the film was a bridge that invited moviegoers into the world of high fashion. 

Baz Luhrmann: You cannot underestimate the power of the cover. 

Hamish Bowles: This it's Hollywood's own Baz Luhrmann, who directed co-produced and co-wrote the film.

Baz Luhrmann: I mean, very quickly, uh, Oprah Winfrey asked us to come on the show, but it all triggered out of the, the word on the street that we were on the cover. And I think that in a way we went around through the back door of cinema culture. Believe you me, not every critic like "Moulin Rouge." It was very harshly dealt with, but through the door of fashion and through the door of music, we were able to let the film breathe into culture by not having to go down the normal road of ticks and crosses in terms of a cinema release.

Hamish Bowles: Finding non-traditional ways of executing his vision is part of Baz Luhrmann's ethos. And that's precisely what he had to tap into to sell the idea of a movie that collided head-on with not just music, but fashion. 

When we were doing "Moulin Rouge", the idea of a musical film and the idea that fashion was going to kind of be integrated into the film and a relationship with pop culture, that idea was completely non-existent. In fact, before the film came out "Saturday Night Live" did a skit and doing kind of, you know, 70s disco tracks in what they imagined the film was going to be like. 

SNL Skit: The story is about love and romance in decadent 1890s Paris, but the music at the "Moulin Rouge" is mostly from the 1970s.

Baz Luhrmann: So there was already a lot of derision. I mean, that was fun. We were all right with that. 

Hamish Bowles: Baz had to drum up genuine interest in his film. So he turned to someone known for pushing boundaries and crafting cultural moments. 

Baz Luhrmann: I sent on a reel cut from the movie to someone I did not know, the editor of Vogue called Anna Wintour. And I sent it to her hoping she might show some interest in the movie and she, more than anybody else, immediately saw her and did quite the incredible thing. She dispatched Annie Liebowitz and her whole crew, they came down while we were shooting and it was like having another film crew. And we connected immediately with Annie and her whole team and we shot both the stills and the movie as we were concluding it. When the movie was complete, I can remember one of the first screenings, Anna put on a celebrity kind of screening and every designer did a "Moulin Rouge" costume and kind of all of New York turned out. Turn out to be one of these kinds of legendary nights, and we were born that night. And from that moment on the relationship between "Moulin Rouge" and fashion, was really the road that birthed the film into pop culture in the United States, and then the rest the world. 

Hamish Bowles: The film left an indelible mark on the fashion world, which was particularly remarkable considering that it was not exclusively a fashion film. Here's British American actress and fashion innovator, Sienna Miller.

Sienna Miller: When I think of Baz I think of just opulence and decadence and I think of "Moulin Rouge". I think that he's someone that really understands fashion and he's a total aesthete, but, but the aesthetic of his films is always so powerful. It's as powerful as the performances and the music and the story.

Hamish Bowles: Here's Vogue Creative Editorial Director Mark Guiducci. 

Mark Guiducci: So "Moulin Rouge" isn't on its face about fashion. It's not about the designer or the industry, but it would be hard to argue that it isn't about fashion. It shares all the same values of performance, surprise, character driven showmanship, and you wouldn't know who those characters were without their clothes. Catherine Martin who's Baz Luhrmann's partner and costume designer is someone that understands how to use clothing to tell a story in a way that is on par with the best designers in the world. Watching a Baz Luhrmann movie is like watching a John Galliano show. 

Hamish Bowles: John Galliano was in fact a direct inspiration for Baz and Catherine Martin's work on "Moulin Rouge".

Baz Luhrmann: We were great fans of John Galliano and we'd seen John's very early shows and I saw how he dealt with kind of nineties crinolines in one of his big fashion shows. And I thought, you know, look at that, in fashion you can take an older costume silhouette and you can reinterpret it. 

Hamish Bowles: Through his reinterpretations of designs that inspired him, Baz created a pastiche of styles that recalled a mixture of periods of fashion history. To him, this was the truest way to represent the characters in the film. 

Baz Luhrmann: We did so much research on corsets it's with Nicole. And I've got amazing tests with Nicole wearing an 1890s corset. It goes right from the bodice right down, very, very skinny constraint, but she didn't move that well in it. Now her character, Satine, in is in fact, based on Marlene Dietrich from "Blue Angel," Marilyn Monroe, and Madonna. We put all these icons together in sort of the look. And so when she comes down out of the ceiling, she's in fact wearing a fifties corset, she's singing "Sparkling Diamond," which is a mashup of "Diamonds are a Girl's Best Friend" and "Material Girl" from Madonna.

Madonna singing: A kiss on the hand may be quite continental, but diamonds are a girl's best friend. 

Because we are living in a material world, and I am a material girl. 

Baz Luhrmann: And so you see in the same way we're meshing up the music. We're also mashing up fashion construction to make a third original look, but it came from trying to decode the character, like let the audience understand who Satine was. If she'd come down in a purely 19th century costume, you might've gone like, "I don't see her sensuality present in a way in which we, the audience can understand today." 

Hamish Bowles: Aligned with the tradition of old Hollywood, Baz translated his love and understanding of film history and fashion history into the forefront of 21st century cinema.

Baz Luhrmann: The idea of the relationship between Hollywood and fashion, if you actually go back to the thirties and the forties, it really flourished. And quite often the relationship was that you do what was called a costume movie and particularly women, or the look of fashion was set usually by that movie. 

Here's Kate Mulleavy, co-founder of Rodarte and fellow fashion history aficionado.

Kate Mulleavy: In the thirties, was the first time that really American design was able to compete with European couture and it was through the great costume designers. And what happened was they put the costumes in all these films, it was during the depression. People needed to have a fantasy experience in film and a lot of those fashions were so forward-thinking they sent these huge trends. And so the actual clothes from the movies would then get sold and bought by fans of the movie, and all those designers became hugely important in terms of the global fashion scene. 

Hamish Bowles: Here's Vogue editor Mark Guiducci. 

Mark Guiducci: Historically, looking back at the early 20th century, actresses didn't wear dresses by designers they wore dresses by costume designers. The same studio costume designers that would make costumes for them in the films made their looks for a premiere or a press event. 

Hamish Bowles: Hollywood costume designers enjoyed this influence. And fashion and Hollywood forged a vibrant relationship from the 1930s. 

Baz Luhrmann: And then it died, completely died. 

Hamish Bowles: Once again, Baz Luhrmann. 

Baz Luhrmann: When I grew up, there was a distinct line between fashion, film, music, high art, like opera, theater, they just didn't mix. And if you were hanging around fashion, you were kind of considered shallow. You couldn't be, you know, substantial filmmakers if you cared about fashion. That line disappeared in the early 2000s.

Hamish Bowles: With "Moulin Rouge", Baz dared to embrace fashion while retaining legitimacy amongst his peers in Hollywood. In doing so, he found a kindred spirit in Anna Wintour. 

Baz Luhrmann: And I think Anna and I, our kind of energy together is this love of high and low. Is this fearlessness amount, you know, smashing the lines between high and low. And in terms of film and fashion, it was all about saying we don't want to live in our silo called fashion. We want to live in music. We want to live in the who's the new most interesting poet. We want to live in and what's going on in politics. We want to live in the world, in the world of popular culture. I mean popular culture is just the output of what's going on in life.

Hamish Bowles: In the nineties, more celebrities started appearing on the cover of Vogue. The 2000s saw the appeal of entertainment and pop culture seep into all the different parts of the fashion business.

Anna Wintour: Well the cover's a poster. I think it has to look like Vogue. It has to be a strong image. It has to be seductive. I remember getting quite a bit of criticism for my first Madonna cover and that, you know, "she's not Vogue, she'll never sell." And you know, it was, it was a little bit risky and you know, it was up something extraordinary, like 40% on the news stand. So that was an eyeopener, I think, to all of us. 

Hamish Bowles: Sienna Miller again. 

Sienna Miller: I think the Anna was really smart, but she sort of saw that there was something that could be utilized there and I think she's always been really prophetic and she's, you know, whatever Vogue is, it's, you know, the meaning of the word is something that kind of defines what is cool. So she really was responsible, I think, for the relationship between Hollywood and fasion now. 

Hamish Bowles: The December 2000 cover of Vogue firmly situated itself at the crossroads of fashion and popular culture, achieving Anna Wintour's vision. Here's Vogue's Fashion News Director, Mark Holgate. 

Mark Holgate: I think when Anna Wintour saw the potential of putting an actor in an incredible outfit and incredible dress on the cover and how that could reverberate in terms of the bigger culture, I think that was probably the aha moment to think there's gotta be a way to bring fashion to the bigger world. I think she's always been someone who sees fashion as having to exist in needing to exist beyond being on a runway show. That it should connect in a bigger, deeper, cultural way with the world and that particular time it's in. And I think that was really in many ways the great change of the 2000s. I think the minute you had actresses or musicians appear in the front row of runway shows, and then maybe a month later, on the red carpet of an awards ceremony or a movie premiere or performing in the clothes that a designer had created as part of a collection. I mean, for example, you think about Madonna. I think it was in the mid nineties when you had Tom Ford do that incredible late sixties, very kind of Julie Christie collection. Madonna was wearing it in one of her videos and it appeared on the red carpet. She wrote on the red carpet. So there was already that fusion happening, I think, in the nineties. And then I think by the 2000. It was really kind of going full throttle,

Hamish Bowles: Despite the standout examples of musicians and other stars who closely collaborated with fashion designers in the nineties, Hollywood and fashion were largely considered separate entities before the 2000s. Fashion Director and frequent Lady Gaga collaborator Nicola Formichetti saw few opportunities to bridge those two worlds during that time, particularly with the music industry.

Nicola Formichetti: At that time, the fashion world and the sort of like the celebrity or music world didn't really collide. In fact, so many people told me why I was working with musicians at that time, because there were a music stylists and then there was fashion stylist. People just didn't understand the music and the fashion didn't really go together. Which sounds really crazy right, today? It's it's mental. Like today it's like, of course, if you're a musician or artist or whatever, there's a connection to fashion. That's how you promote each other. But at that time, no one was doing that. 

Hamish Bowles: At the time, it would have been difficult to foresee Nicola working extensively with talent, like Lady Gaga and forging relationships where in the vast majority of major musical artists would be as deeply involved in what they would wear as what they would perform. The same could be said for film and television at the time. Here's celebrity stylist Kate Young.

Kate Young: Those premiere outfits, I look at them and think, "what did they just go to Macy's and buy that dress?" And yeah, they did, but like nobody saw the pictures either. The premiere was more like an industry party. 

Hamish Bowles: Baz Luhrmann again. 

Baz Luhrmann: But back in the 2000s, really female actors did the kind of, I wear fashion on the red carpet and then not all of them. There'd be a bit of, I can remember actors were a bit like, "Hmm, you know, I don't care about what I'm wearing." and men absolutely not. 

Hamish Bowles: One key strategy in dissolving the barricades between fashion and entertainment, involved recognizing the potential to align their complimentary schedules. 

Mark Guiducci: The movie industry had yet to be disrupted by all the streaming services. And it really worked like clockwork. 

Hamish Bowles: This is Mark Guiducci. 

Mark Guiducci: And the awards campaign would start at a festival like Cannes in May or over the summer at Venice, Toronto in September. And then a film would get a release date slated for the fall, which would be far enough away from the Oscars that you could pick up steam, but not so far away that people would forget about it. And that would kick off an award season that started to snowball in the winter with Golden Globes and culminating in the Academy Awards. And it was all very carefully choreographed, scheduled, and processed. Fashion operates on its own schedule. That's these fashion weeks twice a year with couture in between and then the pre-collections. The job of a magazine like Vogue is to contextualize fashion in the real world or some version of the real world. And what Anna saw was that by putting fashion on people, other than just models, whether it be Madonna or Gwenyth Paltrow or First Lady Hillary Clinton, she brought in new audiences and invited people into a conversation that they had never been invited to before. And in doing so she brought new customers to the designers. 

Hamish Bowles: "Moulin Rouge" wasn't the only major film in the 2000s to land a Vogue cover story. 

Mark Guiducci: In 2006, Sophia Coppola made her film "Marie Antoinette" starting Kirsten Dunst. Uh, Sophia is a great friend of Marc Jacobs and actually hosted a fashion TV show when she was younger. So it's no surprise that her films are always very visually arresting. And this one in particular for obvious reasons lends itself very well to a grand fashion story. And when Annie Leibovitz shot that cover of Kiersten, they did it in costume. 

Hamish Bowles: The cover graced the September issue of Vogue in 2006. 

Mark Guiducci: When you look at that cover that sees her in the 18th century wig, that's probably, you know, 15 inches tall and a powder pink dress against a Brocade wall that's literally in Versailles. It's hard to differentiate that cover image from what might be a film still. And I think that provides a really good example of seeing how Vogue recognized when a cultural moment was not only going to have massive appeal within the fashion world, but also bring fashion to the larger world.

Hamish Bowles: Vogue continued to showcase a flurry of film stars and other icons from music, television, and all the subsets of Hollywood on its monthly covers.

Mark Guiducci: I mean, just look at 2004. I'm looking in the archives right now. January was Jennifer Anniston, February Natalie Portman, March Angelina Jolie, April Gwen Stefani, May was the iconic Nicole Kidman covered by Irvin Penn. June Kate Hudson, July Kirsten Dunst, August you had the Presley women, September you had a rare model moment, that was Natalia, Gisele and Daria, but then you get back to actors in October with Charlize, Jennifer Connelly in November and Kate Blanchet in December. In front of a plane because she was, of course starting this Katherine Hepburn in "The Aviator.". But the idea is that you're passing the magazine cover on the newsstand at the same time that that actress is on the morning talk shows and doing David Leatherman and Jay Leno. So the magazine became part of an ecosystem that was bigger than itself and bigger than fashion, even. 

Hamish Bowles: Amongst all of the icons in the 2000s who perfectly straddle Hollywood and fashion, there's perhaps no one who embodied this duality as seamlessly as actress, Sienna Miller.

Sienna Miller: I probably looked like a sort of psychedelic hippie, I think in the early 2000s. 

Hamish Bowles: We'll hear more from Sienna after the break.

Sienna Miller: In the early 2000s I was really inspired by fashion and really inspired by the effect that an outfit could have on my day. 

Mark Holgate: Sienna Miller burst on the scene from London, 

Hamish Bowles: Here's Vogue editor Mark Holgate. 

Mark Holgate: And she caught the kind of boho, cool girl vibe that was happening in fashion in the 2000s. It was a little bit vintage, a little bit kind of Bohemian, a little bit kind of cutting edge, a little bit kind of street. All of these things mixed up.

Sienna Miller: I would sort of wear skirts as tops and I loved belts. I had baggy boots and jeans and I, I had like slippers that were knitted out of wool and I cut the slipper feet off the bottom and use the wool bit for like a leg warmer thing.

Mark Holgate: I think in Sienna's case, it was entirely her own doing. She wore the things that she loved wearing, and she wore them with great conviction and great authenticity. She was part of this kind of glamorous kind of fusion of fashion and Hollywood. She took risks, whether she was wearing something vintage on the red carpet, or just looking like herself in the kind of gladiator sandals and flowing hippie-ish kind of dresses. She really, she followed her own path. 

Hamish Bowles: Here's Mark Guiducci. 

Mark Guiducci: I mean, Sienna is the very rare actress whose personal style is actually more interesting than whatever a costume designer could put her in. And that has everything to do with who she is and the spirit that she brings with her wherever she goes. It's also made her the perfect avatar for the idea of these industries, the entertainment world, and the fashion world. Combining, so fluidly and seamlessly. 

Sienna Miller: It was mad when I look back on what, what I used to wear, but I think I had so much time to experiment and I think I was young and kind of figuring out who I was independent of school and my parents and, and, you know, happen to live geographically in a place that was really inspiring. 

Hamish Bowles: In short order, Sienna Miller became one of the primary Hollywood stars to dominate the covers of major fashion publications like Vogue.

Sienna Miller: It all happened really, really fast for me in my life. I grew up reading Vogue. I loved the magazine. I mean, I think it, for me, it was the most exciting thing in the world. Take the idea of being on the cover of American Vogue, working with the greatest stylists, the greatest photographers. I worked with Mario Testino and Tonne Goodman and greatest makeup and hair. And yeah, it's sort of a dream come true. It's, that magazine is everything to me in fashion. It's sort of is the everest. 

Hamish Bowles: The 2000s bore witness to the incessant documentation of celebrities by paparazzi. Splashed across the pages of tabloids, photos of Hollywood stars going about their lives or stepping onto red carpets gave new found public access to what industry elite chose to wear. Here's celebrity stylist Kate Young. 

Kate Young: Those weekly magazines were like pre-Instagram. It was like "Star" and "Us Weekly," and there were just so many of them at the time that were like red carpet and paparazzi photos. And you could see what they were wearing all the time. And like people cared, we all cared. It was like the way Instagram is now, you know, it felt like access. And it was like, "oh, the Weekly is going to run like two pages on this premiere and they're going to show her shoes and her bag and a closeup of her face, and her dress. And if she goes out late afterwards, they may get a paparazzi shot of her going into the club." You know, like it, it really showed you the outfits in a way that we didn't really see them before. 

Hamish Bowles: Fashion Director Nicola Formichetti remembers the integral role that the tabloids played in creating buzz around what Hollywood figures wore every day.

Nicola Formichetti: I mean, it was starting to happen. The kind of the merge of the entertainment and the fashion world colliding. But at that time, it was very much about the starting of the paparazzi. So you start seeing celebrities in sort of like the casual wear, going to the coffee shop. 

Mark Holgate: By the 2000s for many actors and musicians, probably either to the joy or perhaps sometimes not their joy, they were constantly in the public eye. 

Hamish Bowles: This is Vogue editor Mark Holgate. 

Mark Holgate: So, what we saw was a kind of rise of young, sometimes not so young actors and musicians starting to wear considered looks in their quote unquote off duty moments too, because they were still being photographed. So there wasn't this kind of disconnect between seeing an actor turn up on the red carpet wearing X designer, and then looking completely different in their everyday lives. They started to get dressed for their everyday lives too. At that point, fashion's intervention into entertainment also made those actors and musicians kind of brands in a way. You know, if you were a certain kind of actor or musician at that point, you know, you had a kind of visual identity that you wanted to convey. I mean, that's always been something that's been very much part of the music world for so long, but even 20 years ago, I think you were starting to see actors really think about how do I want to look when I'm in the public eye. So a celebrity stylist in the 2000s became someone who was dressing celebrities, not just for their high profile public moments, but for their sometimes equally high profile, everyday moments as well. And they turn to women like Rachel Zoe or Kate Young to help them figure it out. 

Hamish Bowles: Again, here's celebrity stylist Kate Young. 

Kate Young: I think what a stylist does, it depends on the client. Sometimes the stylist just calls in clothes. Like some of my clients have really specific ideas about how they want to look. I'm sort of the facilitator and I polish it up and, and other people are like, what should I look like? It can go anywhere from like a full renovation to just like set decoration. 

Hamish Bowles: Rachel Zoe and Kate Young were celebrity stylists who stars began to ask for more elaborate ensembles to wear around town. This is Rachel Zoe. 

Rachel Zoe: What would happened was we'd be in a fitting and I would have all these options and things, and they would be like, "I want to wear this, I wanna wear this. I'm going to dinner. I'm going to this, I'm going to that." Basically we would just make these great outfits and you know, whether it was Mischa, or Nicole, or Lindsey or whoever, it was like, we had so much fun playing dress up and doing these great outfits. And then honestly, it was just sort of like, they would go to the movies. They'd go to dinner. They'd go here ,they go there. And like they'd go to the airport and the paps just followed them and then all of a sudden it was in tabloids. 

Kate Young: Now it's a lot more of like a marketing plan almost. We have a press tour with this many looks. We want them to all look good together cause the chances of like People magazine running all your premiere dresses side by side is high, if they're well executed. So like, let's make sure that there's a story there that there's a theme there that you don't look completely different from one day to the next. In the last 20 years, celebrity styling has changed entirely. It went from being almost unnoticed and a little bit of a side project, to one of the most important ways that people watch fashion and learn about fashion. 

Hamish Bowles: In the 2000s, stylists rose to cultural prominence. Rather than simply styling celebrities, they became celebrities in their own, right. Rachel Zoe went on to star in her own television show, "The Rachel Zoe project," the reality documentary series followed the behind the scenes moments of Rachel's work styling celebrity clients. Fans may remember the opening of the pilot episode. 

Rachel Zoe: I'm Rachel Zoe and I'm a stylist. Most big celebrities prefer to have a stylist. They need to look their best. I find the dresses, the jewelry, the handbags, the shoes, and then I put it all together and create the ultimate red carpet moment. Any reason to dress up is absolutely reasonable. I'm all about the wow factor. 

Hamish Bowles: The success of "The Rachel Zoe Project" was a signal that fashion had become undeniably mainstream. It was no longer constrained to fashion industry insiders. It has permeated pop culture. 

Rachel Zoe: It became so much about what celebrities are wearing. And I think the designers were really seeing that what celebrities wore, especially ones that got picked up by tabloids, whatever they wore was sold out in 30 seconds. And, you know, that's why there's certain designers you see on red carpet more than others. I mean, there's certain designers that have celebrities wearing them on the red carpet as a priority and some don't. But I think at that time there was this huge shift in the sort of conversion into sales. And I think that was probably the big switch. You know, the big change is I think it started to really become a business of fashion. 

Hamish Bowles: From the celebrities perspective, there were ways to take advantage of those occasions to step into the limelight. Nicola Formichetti saw how Lady Gaga's his relationship with paparazzi and fashion evolved. 

Nicola Formichetti: You kind of start losing the mystique and we, we really try to, um, keep that. So we couldn't really get away from paparazzi. So we kind of, you know, Gaga kind of twisted the whole thing around and we made that into a whole performance moment and that was really incredible. You know, so it was like this kind of surreal moment. 

Hamish Bowles: Stars like Lady Gaga, harness fashion to make powerful statements, reinvent themselves, and establish their own brand. Vogue editor Mark Holgate notes that Gaga's collaborative relationship with British designer Alexander McQueen was a prime example of fashion and celebrity playing off each other in the 2000s.

Mark Holgate: I think what's interesting about the relationship between Lady Gaga and Nicola Formichetti, and a house like McQueen, towards the end of the 2000s is that, uh, increasingly what we saw were celebrities, uh, and creative individuals like Gaga, choose houses and labels and brands that she felt aligned with her own particular idea of how the world should be, which was kind of an exciting and creative and dramatic and a little bit transgressive. So it was kind of the perfect marriage in a way, you know, you had two risk takers, Gaga and the house and McQueen working together. So increasingly I think what we saw were people thinking whether it was the celebrity or the house itself saying, "Who's right for us? Who works for me? Who, who do I have a kind of creative dialogue and relationship with?" And I think increasingly that became part of the conversation. It wasn't just, you know, someone wearing something just because the house was well known and they were asking them to wear their clothes. I think it became a much more nuanced as time went on. With Gaga, I think she was someone who really saw the performance of fashion as something that could be part of the Lady Gaga character, the Lady Gaga persona. You know, it wasn't that she was just wearing incredible armadillo, stiletto boots, and a sculpted McQueen dress at an award ceremony or onstage. That she would also turn up wearing those clothes in her real life. She was and is a wonderful advocate for fashion and for taking risks. She really understood that if you're a Gaga you're expected to make a splash. And she made a splash wherever she went and with whatever she wore.

Ellen DeGeneres: Lady Gaga, Bad Romance!

Lady Gaga: Thank you so much to everyone and thank you to Alexander McQueen for sending me all the beautiful clothes for my video. 

Hamish Bowles: By at the end of the 2000s, the worlds of Hollywood and high fashion diffused into one another at an accelerated pace. Just as celebrities, like Lady Gaga, asserted themselves as influential fashion forces. The industry's top designers began playing a bigger role in the world of film. Rodarte co-founders Kate and Laura Mulleavy released a runway collection drawing inspiration from ballet and horror film. This collection made them the natural choice to design pieces for the 2010 thriller, "Black Swan." For Kate and Laura, merging fashion and film was a dream realized. Here's Kate.

Kate Mulleavy: When we first became fashion designers, we were actually thought we wanted to be costume designers. It was always a huge interest for us. We also were really interested in filmmaking and what we ended up doing on the film was designing all the ballet costumes. So anything that was, you know, her practice tutu, the maiden, the black swan, the white swan, all of that. The Rothbart. The, all the characters in the ballet we did and then we also did very character centric pieces, whether or not it's her gown that she wears to this gala event or her knitwear. And I feel, to me, it's representative of really who we are as designers. 

Hamish Bowles: Here's Laura Mulleavy. 

Laura Mulleavy: We had done the costumes for "Black Swan." And went on this whole journey with Natalie Portman, making her Oscar gown that she won best actress in and, you know, going through that whole experience of doing costume design for a film, that was one of the most beautiful films of all time. 

Hamish Bowles: Fashion designers in film, film stars as fashion designers, the venn diagram between Hollywood and fashion had more overlap over time.

Baz Luhrmann: The culture itself was losing all of these barriers, as we said. 

Hamish Bowles: This is Baz Luhrmann. 

Baz Luhrmann: The audience for fashion, the walls had smashed. It, wasn't just, you know, female, it wasn't just of a certain age. It was everybody. Today, it's completely different. It's completely different for Timmy Chalamet to go down a red carpet and, you know, um, put on designs by someone that he feels expresses him, that he wants to express himself is completely part of being a performer.

Hamish Bowles: Sienna Miller again. 

Sienna Miller: Well I think that as fashion and film became so synonymous, I think that when you're promoting film now, and if it's a big film or if you're a successful person, you're sort of expected to look a certain way and designers have relationships with actors, actors are ambassadors for brands. It's like the whole thing is completely entwined. 

Hamish Bowles: Today, fashion and celebrity go hand in hand and anyone watching takes inspiration from both worlds in dressing for their everyday lives. 

Sienna Miller: I can't really see any boundary between the film world, the fashion world, the music world, like it feels like fashion is sort of at the epicenter of a lot is what is happening.

Baz Luhrmann: Even people who say they're not into fashion or into film because characters define themselves by what they put on. Even if they get up and they put on working clothes, that's a definition of self. And so it's a universal language fashion.

Hamish Bowles: Today, the popularity of major fashion events in broader pop culture alongside the enduring presence of fashion themed television shows are evidence that fashion has become a form of entertainment. One trailblazer, and bringing fashion to the small screen was one of the most iconic shows of the 2000s, "Sex and the City." Stay tuned for our next episode, in which "Sex and the City's" costume designer, Pat Field and Sarah Jessica Parker will break down the most memorable looks from the shows six seasons. Come hear the stories behind the creation of television's most fashionable character.

In Vogue: the 2000s is presented by Anna Wintour produced by Vogue in partnership with Pod People. Production support by Jacquelyn Jamjoom, Tony Mantia, Rachael King, Matt Sav, Aimee Machado, Madison Lusby, Fedia Lucas, Marie McCoy Thompson, Morgane Fouse, Mariah Dennis, Adam Raymonda, Nicki Stein, Percia Verlin, and Stefanie Bichara. Theme music composed by DJ Ghostdad. Vogue's editorial team is Laird Borelli-Persson, Mark Holgate, Nicole Phelps and myself, Hamish Bowles. Special thanks to Vogue's Creative Editorial Director Mark Guiducci, VP of Digital Video Programming and Development Robert Semmer, VP of Audio Julie Shen, and Director of Podcasts Nico Steele. Please do subscribe to the podcast. It helps new listeners find the show. You can find additional information, incredible imagery, and episode references in the show notes or vogue.com/podcast. I'm your host, Hamish Bowles. Until next week, In Vogue.