Over the last few years, vintage and archival fashion have become more and more popular on the red carpet. This progression has many upsides, with vintage being much better for the environment and also potentially not sewn by grossly underpaid (if not underage) laborers. So we can all feel good about that. Plus, some of the archival looks that stylists have been pulling for their clients over the last few years have been seriously magnificent: Jared Ellner’s work with Sabrina Carpenter and anything Law Roach touches for Zendaya comes to mind.
Lately, though, this trend has taken one step further into what might be described as a kind of meta-archival trend, in which a celebrity dons a piece of vintage clothing on a red carpet that another celebrity wore years before. The obsession with re-creating these moments has even led some stars—who likely couldn’t get their hands on the original, iconic vintage garment—to wear exact replicas, in which case I take back what I said about the environment.
It’s definitely for the best that we as a society have moved past the “Who wore it better?” days of the early 2000s, a time when you would rather be caught dead than photographed in the same dress as someone else (especially someone hotter than you). Now we live in a whole new era: Today, if you don the same outfit another celebrity already wore, it’s no longer considered redundant; it’s considered an homage. And lately everyone is paying homage, a fact that first came to my attention after seeing a headline like, “Sydney Sweeney Pays Tribute to Angelina Jolie.” For a minute, I thought Angelina Jolie had died until I saw that they were referring to her Marc Bouwer dress, which Jolie wore to the 2004 Oscars.
And Sweeney isn’t the only one. This summer Blake Lively appeared on a step-and-repeat for her film It Ends With Us in a Versace dress originally worn by Britney Spears in 2002. Alexa Chung attended London’s Serpentine Summer Party in a re-creation of the iconic green dress Keira Knightley wore in Atonement. At the most recent VMAs, Tate McRae re-created the outfit Britney Spears wore at the 2001 awards show, and at the same event, Sabrina Carpenter paid tribute to Madonna in a sample of the Bob Mackie dress originally worn by Madonna—ironically, in 1991 as an homage to Marilyn Monroe in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. At this rate, someday in the future, I expect to see Khai Malik paying homage to Sabrina Carpenter paying homage to Madonna paying homage to Marilyn Monroe.
Many of these looks, when given a fresh context, are undeniably chic, as if the ghost of the famous person who last inhabited it is on the red carpet alongside the new celebrity, shouting, “I approve!” This, however, is not always the case. In 2022 Kim Kardashian wore to the Met Gala the Bob Mackie dress originally worn by Marilyn Monroe to sing “Happy Birthday” to President John F. Kennedy—a moment that may or may not have truly opened the floodgates on this trend. The move was widely criticized, not least by Mackie himself, who felt concerned for the legacy of the dress he designed for one icon and one icon alone and also (more importantly) for the structural integrity of the archival garment. Despite pushback from designers, fashion conservationists, and the public, Kardashian has forged on—and there appears to be no end in sight.
As I’ve watched these homages unfold on my feeds over the last several months, I’ve wondered if they signal a stagnancy in the fashion world. This trend—which combines two mainstays of American culture, idol worship and upcycled nostalgia—seems akin to the current state of the film industry, churning out regurgitated IP and making superhero sequels over and over and over again. Or maybe it’s just an attempt at a leg up in an oversaturated culture—that because another celebrity wore it before you, their clout might be heaped onto you by fashion osmosis. It’s as if referencing another moment is an added accessory to the outfit, like a coveted handbag. But it’s unclear to me if clout works that way, and anyway, who’s to say if the original celebrity would even approve of the whole endeavor?
There’s, of course, a clear difference between a genuine homage and co-opting an iconic moment in hopes of creating your own. I won’t name names on the latter, but the result sometimes feels anemic and stale. On the former, an authentic homage that comes to mind is Miley Cyrus honoring her godmother Dolly Parton’s iconic bouffant at the Grammys or any time Kate Middleton has emulated her late mother-in-law, Princess Diana.
People say that mimicry is the sincerest form of flattery, but as someone who has a younger sister, I have to call bullshit. Mimicry can be a sincere form of flattery, but with it can also come the potential to devalue the original by turning it into a caricature of itself. This has always been the problem with pastiche. Each time a look is replicated, it’s prone to losing its original subtlety, the same way a meme gets blurrier the more it’s memed until, eventually, the original has lost all its meaning.
Recently, stylist Molly Dickson styled Kaia Gerber in a re-creation of the Hervé Léger dress her mother, Cindy Crawford, wore to the 1993 Oscars. “I thought it would be amazing to pay tribute to Cindy’s iconic moment,” Dickson told Vogue. A few weeks later, Susan Sarandon’s daughter Eva Amurri rewore her mother’s 2003 Donna Karran Oscar dress to the Metropolitan Opera Opening Night Gala. “Swipe all the way to see where I got this vintage @donnakarran dress from,” she wrote on Instagram.
I happened to ransack my own mother’s closet in need of something to wear to a friend’s wedding last weekend. Obviously my mom isn’t Cindy Crawford or Susan Sarandon, but in light of this new trend, I felt different as I snuck into her closet—less like an angsty teen in need of something to wear and more like I was rifling through a rack of old classics ready for their comeback. I pulled out a John Galliano for Christian Dior dress that she wore to the 56th Emmy Awards in 2004. When she saw a picture of me wearing it “without her permission,” however, she wasn’t pleased, to say the least. Moreover, I accidentally cut my ankle and almost stained the lilac fabric with my disgusting blood.
“Seriously, Cazzie??” she said (even though the dry cleaner basically got it out!).
I told her it was an homage.