The red carpet is the strip of crimson laid out for arriving guests at premieres, galas and award ceremonies, where the photographs happen long before anything else does. Its first known appearance is literary: in Aeschylus’s Agamemnon, staged in 458 BC, the king returning from Troy hesitates to step onto a crimson path laid for him, fearing that such an honour belongs to the gods. Red was a luxury in itself, coaxed at great cost from cochineal insects.
The phrase red-carpet treatment owes a good deal to a train. From 1902 the New York Central Railroad rolled out crimson carpet for passengers boarding its 20th Century Limited. Hollywood caught up later: the Academy Awards adopted the carpet in 1961, television soon turned the arrivals into a show of their own, and since the early 2000s the Oscars have used a deeper shade nicknamed Academy Red. Few guests today hesitate quite as much as Agamemnon did.