A person wearing a Gucci outfit is pictured in the street outside the Gucci collection show at the Milan Fashion Week Womenswear Autumn/Winter 2024-2025 on February 23, 2024 in Milan. (Photo by Marco Bertorello / AFP)
Milan: You enter a room and - gasp! - someone across from you is wearing the same outfit.
Relax, it happens. It's Milan Fashion Week and guests have sported the same outfits in runway shows running from Wednesday to Sunday.
More than 50 catwalk shows on the women's Fall/Winter 2024-2025 calendar from Diesel and Dolce & Gabbana to Gucci and Versace draw guests from all over the world but many of them end up looking near identical.
At Fendi on the opening day, two influencers from Dubai stood toe-to-toe chatting and wearing the exact same animal print lace-up boots.
Meanwhile, the colour-block print shirt adorned with the Fendi logo that 29-year-old Fatma Husam sported was the one chosen by multiple other women.
Did that bother her?
"It's completely normal," Husam said. "Because after all, how many clothes do these brands make anyway?"
Her friend, Deema Alasadi, 35, agreed.
"At a party I would be a bit busted, but at Fashion Week it's totally normal."
Japanese musicians Aya and Ami, known collectively as Amiaya, took it to the next level as only twins can with matching cherry red bob hairstyles and identical high black Fendi boots with gold heels.
Later Wednesday at Roberto Cavalli, a blonde woman in a long flowy gown printed with lemons from designer Fausto Puglisi's 2024 Resort collection smiled coyly for the cameras.
Nearby, another guest pouted and posed in a bodysuit sewn of cheetah fabric -- a mainstay of the brand.
But those not the only lemons and animal prints in the room.
'Herd instinct'
Luxury brands personally dress the A-list celebrities who attend their fashion shows in up-to-the-minute looks -- such as the all-black-clad Uma Thurman and Sharon Stone at Tom Ford Thursday night -- making sure not to duplicate looks in the front rows.
But influencers -- who are sometimes sent the most coveted "it" items by the labels -- and other guests are left to rummage through their own closets, making duplications from past seasons inevitable.
But the devil is in the details, said Husam at the Fendi show.
"Everyone may be wearing the same pieces, but styling them differently," she said.
Copycat looks are most obvious when it comes to brands with in-your-face logos, such as Gucci and Versace, but harder to detect with those taking a subtler approach, such as Prada and Armani.
It is common among fashion editors who attend shows, said Godfrey Deeny, global editor-in-chief of FashionNetwork.com.
"If you're an editor you're always looking for the new, but you also have a herd instinct that you want everyone to know you know what the new thing is," he said.
"So you collectively all wear the same clothes."
Many in the industry take comfort, he said, in knowing that "when you go, you'll all be wearing the same absurd sneaker."
Of course when it comes to the brand's employees, security guards and ushers at fashion shows, it is standard to wear the same thing: black.
