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In 1999, Gwyneth Paltrow burst upon the pop culture scene, winning an Oscar for “Shakespeare in Love” — and setting off a craze when she picked up her statuette wearing a pale pink Ralph Lauren dress.

Across the country, pink dresses were suddenly hot and Lauren was again in the middle of yet another fashion trend — like his 1996 Polo Jeans campaign with Bridget Hall that had everyone looking for that sexy, girl next door look.That jeans campaign helped launch Lauren’s 1997 initial public offering.

By the time Paltrow was blubbering on stage and accepting her Academy Award, Lauren’s fast-growing apparel company was registering annual sales gains of 16 percent — followed the next year by a gain of 13 percent. Lauren could do no wrong, it seemed. But that was the last year the Bronx-born designer would dress a Best Actress Oscar winner.

In fact, this century, no Best Actress Oscar winner has chosen to wear a dress designed by Lauren, Calvin Klein, Oscar de La Renta or Donna Karan — four of the best known American designers. While dressing an Oscar-winner is just single and arbitrary yardstick to gauge the popularity of a designer, the slump by the foursome does undress a simple fact: each of the four legendary designers’ brands is at a crossroads. Younger US fashion houses, like Tom Ford, Marchesa and Rodarte, are appealing more to today’s millennial and Gen-X actresses and taste-makers — eating into the revenues of the big four.

Plus, changing cultural trends have more folks choosing their own styles of dress. And if those evolutionary, plate-shifting moves weren’t enough, that badass recession in 2009 also knocked the stuffing out of people’s wallets, forcing them to trade down and leave designer duds on the store rack.So where does leave Ralph, Calvin, Oscar and Donna?

Battered and bruised — but they are not taking it lying down.

“Did we drop the ball? Did we make some things wrong?” Lauren asked at the company’s investor presentation in June. “Absolutely. Am I happy about it? No, but I believe in this company.” The 76-year designer was clearly not happy. Shares in his company at the time were down about 23 percent over the five previous years and sales gains averaged just 2 percent a year over the previous four years. Which is why Lauren had, last September, stepped away from the CEO role — appointing a 41-year-old who’d cut his teeth at the fast fashion giants of retail, H&M and Old Navy.

At the investor presentation — the first in company history — the new CEO, Stefan Larsson, had been on the job for nine months. Attacking the corporate malaise with a new set of eyes, Larsson axed 1,000 jobs, or 8 percent of the payroll, and announced plans to shutter 50 stores.

“We are going to cut the unproductive, long tail of the company,” Larsson told Wall Street that June day. Three brands out of nearly a dozen account for the majority of Lauren’s sales and those labels — Ralph Lauren, Polo and Lauren — are going to get the most love, he said.

Like many companies, Lauren had gotten too bloated inside and produced too many different styles. Larsson set out to pare back the bloat. He cut back the layers of management between the CEO and the designers actually making the clothing from nine to six. Knowing that fast-fashion retailers like H&M pushed clothes from sketch to store much faster than Lauren, Larsson set out to streamline the supply chain. His plan is to cut the time it takes to make new fashions from 15 months to nine.

“It has reached a tipping point, where the really big companies are affected now and you either deal with it head-on or play defense,” said one top executive. “Only the strongest brands will survive.”

The same Lauren-style soul-searching shake-up is happening at the houses of Calvin, Oscar and Karen. Their top management and even ownership is getting a makeover.

Calvin Klein, owned by conglomerate PVH, pushed out its two veteran creative designers, women’s collection boss Francisco Costa and men’s apparel boss Italo Zucchelli. Together they controlled the look and feel of the brand since the 73-year old Seventh Avenue icon left the company in 2002.

The buzz among many fashionistas is that the brand, and its $8.2 billion in global retail sales, had lost its way. The days of splashy ad campaigns that got people buzzing about the brand like Mark “Marky Mark” Wahlberg and Kate Moss in their skivvies and Brooke Shield’s telling the world in 1980 that nothing got between her and her Calvins were over.

In June, Calvin himself told talk show host, Andy Cohen, “It’s been a long time since I saw something exciting.” By August, Costa and Zucchelli were replaced by the former Christian Dior designer, Raf Simons — a rock star in the fashion world. The change in attitude at Klein and the need for a new direction at the design house can be summed up in two words: Kendall Jenner.

Calvin is not of fan of the 20-year old model and ripped into her this past spring, saying while Justin Bieber’s Calvin Klein underwear ad campaign was great, she wasn’t right for the brand. He would have never picked her for a Calvin campaign, he said.

But Costa did choose her and the Jenner campaigns for underwear and jeans have certainly created some buzz, especially for an ad featuring a grapefruit critics claimed was too erotic.

It’s the kind of chatter the Donna Karan would kill for. By the time the 67-year old designer left her brand last year, it too, had veered off course. Where the brand was practically a workplace uniform for women in the 1980s and 1990s — her Essentials line of seven easy mix-and-match pieces were, like, in every closet — it had long become an afterthought.

In 2001, French luxury group LVMH though it could continue the magic of the Nineties and bought Karan’s company for $643 million. It failed. Sales continued to slip; buzz was non-existent. Part of the problem, say insiders, is that Karan herself lost interest in her brand, increasingly withdrawing from the design process and clashing with the corporate bigwigs.

Last month, LVMH, sold the money losing Donna Karan International for $650 million to G-III Apparel Group, which operates outlet stores and sells a lot of apparel to Macy’s, Kohl’s, JC Penney. At its peak the Karan brand brought in up to $800 million in sales, but by the time it was sold it was bringing in a skinny $300 million, according to G-III Apparel.

Oscar de la Renta was under the glare of fashion’s spotlight as its chief designer Peter Copping left in July — after just two years at the helm. Copping was Oscar’s hand-picked successor before the couturier’s death in 2014. And while the circumstances of Copping’s departure were not entirely clear — the company delivered a cryptic statement about “personal circumstances” — fashion experts agree that the brand needs to find its voice again.

After five decades of dressing every first lady from Jackie Kennedy to Michelle Obama and countless celebrities, including Sarah Jessica Parker and Oprah, the Dominican-born designer and his company is seen through the lens of the past, not the future. The brand, known for its evening gowns (hello, First Ladies) and upscale ready-to-wear, has been unable to branch out from there.

Just this month Oscar CEO Alex Bolen (who is also Oscar’s son-in-law) brought back two Oscar proteges Bolen had booted in favor of Copping. Husband and wife duo, Fernando Garcia and Laura Kim, will be the next creative directors of Oscar.

Perhaps the problems facing the entire fashion world is evolutionary. For decades, fashion was the defining cultural touchstone for young adults.

Today, many believe, it’s technology.

Modal TriggerBrie Larson brings Calvin Klein back to the red carpet at the 2016 Golden Globes.

“When the automobile and tech business is more fashionable than fashion, that’s a problem,” said Marshal Cohen, chief industry analyst at NPD Group. “We’ve allowed other industries to out fashion fashion.”

If so, then who are the fashion houses talking to?

“They are all trying to figure out who their customer is and who they are designing for,” said Fern Mallis, New York Fashion Week creator. One thing is for sure — each of the four brands is aware of the problem and is moving fast to grow sales and make themselves more buzzworthy.

At the Golden Globes this year, Brie Larson, 26, won the award for Best Actress in a Drama for her performance in “Room.” She looked fantastic in a glimmery, golden Calvin Klein gown.

It wasn’t the Academy Awards, but it’s a heckuva start for a comeback.Read more at:evening gowns | princess formal dresses