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.