The Gap is not known for its ballgowns. But at 2025’s Golden Globes, the Emmy-winning actress Claire Danes arrived on the red carpet in a damnnn of a white silk dress born in the same San Francisco mega-office as logo hoodies and $74.99 jeans.
The floor-length piece was hand-embroidered in white sequin paillettes and bugle beads. It was created by Zac Posen, the Executive Vice President and Creative Director of Gap Inc., who has made similar looks for Gwyneth Paltrow and Rihanna. You couldn’t buy it — unless you were Timothée and Kylie, you couldn’t even get within standing distance of it. The gown was by all accounts rare, and it was also the apex of an increasingly common trend: chain stores that are for everyone making custom pieces that are for a single moment in the spotlight.
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The practice of mass labels making one-of-a-kind outfits has hit warp speed since 2020. Most recently, Zara made Bad Bunny a “custom” outfit for the Super Bowl that consisted of tailored trousers, a cropped white-and-cream “64” football jersey, and a white button-up underneath.
Then there was the “bespoke” Pandora jewelry that wound around FKA Twigs for October’s British fashion awards. Victoria’s Secret outfitted Sabrina Carpenter in hand-crystalled corsets for her 2025 summer tour, and Naomi Osaka has regularly sported custom Nike pieces on the tennis court. Sydney Sweeney recently appeared in a custom American Eagle denim dress. Meanwhile, Gap has created the most show-stopping moments in the custom space, all billed to its higher-end platform, GapStudio, including red-carpet pieces for Mr. Chalamet, Anne Hathaway, Demi Moore, and, just this week, Sombr.
Why all the work for things we can’t buy? “Custom dressing through GapStudio is another way of participating in the cultural conversation,” says Posen from his San Francisco studio. “When someone sees a custom GapStudio gown or tailored look on a red carpet, it expands the perception of what the brand can be and [is] a reminder that great design can live anywhere.” Posen says the custom looks also inform his ready-to-wear designs for GapStudio, calling his celebrity atelier “a laboratory and an ecosystem” that can trickle down to a Fifth Avenue flagship near you.
Sarah Shapiro, retail editor at the publication Puck, adds that for corporations such as Gap Inc. and Zara, “it’s all about Launchmetrics,” the tracking platform that tells brands exactly how many people are looking at their clothes and talking about their brands online. “It’s so important to stakeholders that their brands are being talked about,” says Shapiro, who worked as a retail executive before becoming an industry watchdog. “Every board meeting includes data about it. It’s not optional.”
Custom outfits ensure a brand is always getting pinged online, even in spaces like the Oscars, which is normally a runway remix from the Paris couture shows. “Let’s be real: It’s also a covert sponsorship situation,” Shapiro says. “And mall brands have so much more money than most higher fashion brands, especially for endorsement deals. Like, so much money.”
A celebrity stylist for A-list actresses and pop stars says the cash is a crucial part of his clients’ decision to accept mass-market custom offers. But, he added, “The mass brands spend a ton of money to get the custom pieces made by real artists. It’s incredibly high quality. Honestly, I’ve dressed clients in YSL and Chanel, and I’ve dressed clients in Gap and Victoria’s Secret. When it's a truly custom look, you sometimes can’t tell the difference.”
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It was 1996 when Sharon Stone wore a black Gap T-shirt on the Oscars carpet — and then, it was kind of a fluke. After a FedEx delivery guy ran over her original Vera Wang gown by mistake, she called her Basic Instinct costume designer Ellen Mirojnick, who grabbed the $14.99 tee from her closet and paired it with a Valentino skirt and an Armani jacket. Two years later, Stone wore a $34.99 white Gap button-up with a silk Vera Wang skirt. Even though her total looks still cost more than a car, the affordable touch endeared Stone to the public, with outlets ranging from Vogue to Page Six celebrating her high-low taste.
Although pairing cheap hoodies with expensive handbags became a staple of Y2K dressing, thanks mostly to Kate Moss and every other famous person trying to dress like Kate Moss, the ascendance of a “fast custom” outfit didn’t really hit until 2012, when Jenna Lyons was first finding fame as J.Crew’s capable, quirky creative director. For her first Met Gala appearance that year, Lyons wore a custom hot pink ball skirt that mimicked J.Crew’s catalog offerings. She paired it with a $120 J.Crew denim evening jacket of her own design. Two years later, H&M got in on the fun, dressing a still-palatable Nicki Minaj and model Ashley Graham for the brand’s 2014 Met Gala debut.
When Topshop joined the scrum in 2015, it put Hailey Bieber (then Baldwin) and Emily Ratajkowski in dresses that it later replicated for $399 each. “Nobody bought them until we reduced them to $100,” says a former Topshop employee who remembers the hubbub.
The custom-to-mall pipeline didn’t really stick the landing until Posen made a shirt dress for Anne Hathaway in May of 2024. The actress paired it with a diamond-and-sapphire Bvlgari necklace that could have been a heist prop in Oceans 8. Shortly after the big reveal, which inspired breathless “Anne Hathaway Went to the Mall Before Her Roman Holiday” headlines, GapStudio made a mass-produced version of the dress available online. It was $158 and sold out in less than three minutes. “It was really the first time we saw that immediate click-to-buy moment result from a custom piece,” Shapiro says. “But even then, there were nerves. Like, obviously, Anne had her dress beautifully tailored. Would this be as good?”
Fashion editors wondered the same thing. “Is GapStudio Just Overpriced Gap?” asked Frances Solá-Santiago in The New York Times. “I Tried Anne Hathaway’s Dress. Can It Save Gap?” wrote Anna Murphy at the UK Times. At InStyle, fashion editor Madeline Hirsch also wondered whether the dress could possibly hold up on non-movie stars. All three editors declared the dress “great,” a real win considering only InStyle makes its money from fashion ads (such as those purchased by Gap).
But while Gen X and Millennials may see custom pieces as templates for their own clothes, Gen Z seems to take the elevated outfits as pure inspiration. Sabrina Carpenter’s Victoria’s Secret corsets didn’t inspire feverish lines at stores. “I know you can’t just get Sabrina’s outfits there,” said a 19-year-old named Olivia, clutching a Victoria’s Secret shopping bag while waiting for a flight home to London. “But it’s fun to see her wearing a version of what you might be able to buy. Even though you can’t buy the exact thing, obviously.”
NYU fashion professor and brand consultant Jessica Minkoff explained that, for brands such as Victoria’s Secret in a “transitional” phase with customers — too big to be “cancelled,” but too dependent on the fickle taste of youth culture to be home free — working with a girls’ girl like Carpenter is a big win. “It serves to remind the younger shoppers that VS is a thing,” Minkoff says. Currently, VS Pink has a newspaper dress that echoes Carpenter’s newspaper corset from her Short ‘n’ Sweet tour. It’s on sale for $34.99. “I actually think it’s smarter to do it this way,” says Shapiro, “because celebrities don’t want to be in a who-wore-it-better with some girl on the internet.”
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As we head into Oscar season, Posen promises “there will be more custom explorations ahead” that merge red-carpet prestige with real-world impulse buys. For fashion junkies tired of extra-rarified pieces — a $5,000 beige topper coat from The Row, a $2,500 beige leather sack dress from Toteme — the wink of a mall brand whipping up something in their custom atelier that you can later get for $200 is pretty damn satisfying. Celebrities, too, are excited for a subversive piece that can make them seem more relatable. “Look at how Michelle Obama wore J.Crew on the campaign trail,” Shapiro says. “We love it when our most famous people dress down-to-earth, as long as it’s still extra polished.”
But like the Greek ouroboros that won’t stop eating its own tail, the custom trend is already beginning to consume itself. After it became clear that Bad Bunny’s bespoke Zara look wouldn’t be rolled out by the Spanish mega-brand, shoppers began combing the internet for their own versions of the jersey Googled ‘round the world. Searches for Bad Bunny’s modified football jersey spiked 1,490% on Google Trends in the week following the Super Bowl. With no “official” version to grab, fans landed on Etsy to order their own “64” jerseys in leather or cotton… essentially commissioning their own custom knockoffs of the custom outfit they weren’t supposed to buy in the first place.
