Did Anne Hathaway just pay homage to Britney Spears by donning double denim?

Anne Hathaway wears double denim by Ralph Lauren to the CFDA Fashion Awards at the American Museum of Natural History in New York on November 6, 2023. Photo / Getty Images

The star-studded CFDA Fashion Awards (which sees industry body Council of Fashion Designers of America award talent) took place in New York City this week, and Anne Hathaway’s red-carpet choice felt particularly prescient from a pop-culture lens, with the Oscar-winner walking the red carpet at the American Museum of Natural History in a double-denim look designed by Ralph Lauren, fresh off the runway from New York Fashion Week.

Denim on this level isn’t common for red carpet events — although Taylor Swift, Hunter Schafer and Jodie Turner-Smith have all worn it recently — and it calls to mind a major pop culture moment at a time when its origin story is very much in the spotlight.

Is Hathaway intentionally paying homage to Britney Spear’s famous ensemble from the 2001 American Music Awards?

Britney Spears and Justin Timberlake of NSYNC at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles in 2001. Photo / WireImage

Aesthetically, the similarities are significant: a bustier top and a long skirt, both made from faded blue denim with distressed detailing.

And the timing comes in the wake of the singer’s revealing biography, The Woman In Me, published last month to intense speculation and discussion.

“Justin was going to wear denim and I said, ‘We should match! Let’s do denim-on-denim!’,” Spears writes about the famous look. “I get that it was tacky, but it was also pretty great in its way.”

As she discusses in the book, which comes off the back of Paris Hilton’s memoir earlier this year, their generation had a particularly tough time in the media glare of the early 2000s (the audiobook is narrated by another member of their Hollywood cohort, Michelle Williams) and Hathaway — currently enjoying a renaissance of popularity — experienced how fickle fame can be.

The actor endured her own chapter of public criticism, becoming a pop culture punchline in the wake of co-hosting the 2011 Oscars with James Franco — considered by critics and viewers to be one of the worst ceremonies in the Academy Awards history. “He didn’t give me anything,” she told People in 2019. “It’s just a no-win situation.” The blame disproportionally fell on Hathaway.

Like Spears, she became a media punchline for a period, and 2013′s #HathaHate chapter is just one of too many examples of how culture turns on women in the public eye.

Now, she’s a fan favourite again, enjoying a high point of her career, and a new generation discovering her career-making performance in the famous fashion film The Devil Wears Prada.

Hathaway’s also cultivated fashion influence, with respected red-carpet choices (she works with super-stylist Erin Walsh) that regularly earn praise from traditional and social media, brand relationships with Bulgari and Versace, and increasingly bold choices for public outings; there was the sheer Valentino at Cannes Film Festival earlier this year. Usually choosing more glamorous fabric, her double denim look works surprisingly well, elevated with Bulgari jewellery.

And whether parallels with Spears’ style canon are intentional or not, Hathaway shows that the red carpet can be a medium for communicating, or at least nodding to the current discourse.

And as we know, trends are circular. The double denim of the 90s and 00s — once a fashion faux pas — is no longer considered bad taste, nor is treating women in the spotlight as a punching bag.