If meta dressing started out as a funny quirk, it’s now in danger of becoming a standard. Daniel Rodgers, the fashion news editor at Vogue, sees it as part of a wider change. “It is another example of fashion as entertainment,” he says. “It’s another arc on that graph.” Ilaria Urbinati, a stylist who often works with celebrities for red-carpet events, says that’s not necessarily a bad thing. “The concept of meta dressing lends itself to more cohesive storytelling behind the looks,” she argues. “I personally love that about it.”

Urbinati says she hasn’t gone “super hard, to a Barbie level” with meta dressing, but her clients have nodded to films they are promoting. “When I styled Aaron Taylor-Johnson for Nosferatu, we went with looks that leaned darker and more gothic,” she says. “And for Dwayne Johnson and Chris Evans’ movie Red One, we definitely went with very Christmasy looks.”

Rodgers says sometimes it doesn’t always have to be too signposted. He points to James Norton, who promoted the Netflix series House Of Guinness wearing Guinness-themed pins on his lapel. “There are subtle ways of doing it,” he says.

Part of the motivation for adding these nods to outfits is – to get even more meta about it – articles like this. If a nice suit is, well, a nice suit, Chalamet dressed as a deep-cut Bob Dylan is sure to get people talking. “The harder you lean into it, the more it creates buzz,” Urbinati says. “I think it gets the audience excited and in the mood for the film – which really is the point of a press tour when it comes down to it.”

“I don’t think we necessarily connect with [the film] more, but we think about it more, or the film lodges itself in our mind that much more, in the run up,” Rodgers says. There is also an element of being in on the joke. “It’s entertaining because you can look at it and say, ‘Oh, I get it. Haha, they look like their character – and isn’t that funny?’”

Rodgers thinks there is an argument that meta dressing gives men a free pass on the red carpet – because rather than embodying the style, this approach feels safe as a form of costume. “If a man is already perhaps more reticent to engage with fashion, or is more self-conscious about style and to explore the contours of their masculinity at all, is it easier to hide behind a character?” he asks.

The counter to this could be that seeing these outfits outside of the movie screen potentially gives a masterclass in how to take the influence of someone’s style and bring it into a kind of real world, or as close to it as the world of movie stars gets. Robbie’s Barbie outfits led to an entire trend – Barbiecore – for summer 2023, while Chalamet’s co-signing of Dylan’s style no doubt put it on the radar of a younger generation.

Urbinati has observed this firsthand. “When I styled Donald Glover for Solo, we went very 1970s,” she says. “And I like to think that had an influence on menswear at the time.”

With awards season around the corner, are we set to see the red carpet go even more meta? Urbinati, for one, is on board. “It’s fun and, for the film, it’s a winning formula,” she says. “I don’t see it going anywhere.”