THE JOURNAL
From left: Jeremy Allen White promoting Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere at the Hotel De La Ville in Rome, 10 October 2025. Photograph by Massimo Insabato/Archivio Massimo Insabato/Mondadori Portfolio via Getty Images. Timothée Chalamet at a screening of Marty Supreme in Los Angeles, 14 November 2025. Photograph by Eric Charbonneau/A24 via Getty Images
Alexander Skarsgård’s latest film Pillion is about a biker in a BDSM relationship. But you might have guessed that even before you bought your popcorn – if you happened to catch Skarsgård on the red carpet at premieres for the film, wearing the clothes that signal this culture: leather trousers, black boots and a slightly risqué halterneck-style shirt. If that all sounds a little out-there – although it tracks with Skarsgård’s recent style experimentations, which have also seen him wear tiny shorts and sports jacket on a talk show – it’s actually part of a wider trend on the red carpet, one where actors directly reference the film they are promoting in the outfits they’re wearing. It’s all very meta.
If women like Margot Robbie and Zendaya pioneered this type of method dressing initially by dressing, respectively, like literal Barbie for the Barbie movie in 2023 and a robot for sci-fi film Dune the following year, men have been upping their game recently, too. Jeremy Allen White subtly nodded to Bruce Springsteen during the press tour for the biopic Deliver Me From Nowhere, wearing The Boss’ classic look – the vest-and-shirt combo – but also the leather jackets that fans love from the 1990s.
Of course, there’s Timothée Chalamet. Working with stylist Taylor McNeill, the actor might be the OG of this school of dressing, as seen during his red-carpet appearances to promote Bob Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown last year. Rather than lean into the classic Dylan – sunglasses, polka-dot shirt, black jeans – seen in the film, he went deep into the archives. See, for the New York premiere of the film, Chalamet dressed as Dylan at Sundance in 2003, complete with beanie and blonde wig. With a role as table-tennis player Marty Mauser in Marty Supreme up next, expect retro sportswear on the red carpet.
Timothée Chalamet at the New York premiere of A Complete Unknown, 13 December 2024. Photograph by Nina Westervelt/Variety via Getty Images
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?’”
Aaron Taylor-Johnson at the world premiere of Nosferatu at Zoo Palast in Berlin, 2 December 2024. Photograph by Tristar Media/Getty Images
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.”
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