It's the moment every woman dreads.
Spend a fortune on a fabulous frock...then arrive at the party to find another woman wearing it too.
So just imagine the collective gasp of horror among fashion's finest when they looked at the covers of three rival glossies - and found the same dress on each.
Check out this month's cover of Elle, Vogue and American Magazine W at your local newspaper stand.
"One can only imagine the atmosphere in the London offices of rivals Vogue and Elle when staff realised the same dress featured on the August covers of both magazines. The dress in question is from Italian design house Miu Miu, Prada's diffusion line.
British Elle opted for the lilac version and put singer Lily Ellen into it.
Swedish Elle opted for the lilac, too on model Mona Johannesson.
Vogue and W used it in a striking shade of orange on Danish model Freja Beha Erichsen and Hollywood actress Eva Mendes.
British Elle admits, it's virtually unheard of for the same dress to feature on the same issues of the UK's two biggest fashion glossies, saying that usually the fashion press offices make sure one magazine doesn't get sent the same things as someone else.
When asked about the blunder both Elle and Vogue editors sound remarkably sanguine about the situation.
Exactly who is to blame? Was it Miu Miu's press office, breaking an unwritten rule that you don't send the same dress to competing publications, or was it the magazine trying to steal a march on a rival.
With all the dresses available to Fashion Magazines, how could this happen? To understand this, you first need to know a little bit about the journey that a dress takes from the catwalk to the cover.
For a start, it takes a very special kind of dress to make a cover picture. Just because something looks good on the catwalk, doesn't mean that it will look good on the newsstand.
"Black doesn't work and neither does white," says Liz Jones, the former editor of Marie Claire magazine. As an editor or creative director you have to stake your claim on your catwalk favorites early on, there might be only one sample of each dress so I might even go backstage and see if I could take the dress away with me" adds Jones.
Obviously there is a pecking order and as the US fashion market is bigger, the American editors tend to take precedence.
Frequently, it's the press office that has the unenviable task of effectively being the PA to an inanimate object - organising its passage from one side of the Atlantic to the other, and brokering deals about which magazine gets temporary custody of it and when.
In fact, if you want to know which shows are most likely to be battlegrounds, then simply flick through the glossy mags and tot up who advertises. Because if a brand doesn't advertise, maintains Liz Jones, they simply won't end up on the magazine cover.
'The magazines are slaves to the labels,' she says. 'When I was at Marie Claire, we used to have a board with all the advertisers on - Armani, Versace, Gucci, Prada. Every time you featured an advertiser in the magazine, you racked up points. You knew you had to keep the advertisers happy.
'A cover scored you the maximum number of points. And a celebrity, provided it was a celebrity that the designer liked, scored you more points than a model. Every cover had to feature an advertiser.'
And not just any advertiser, either; only the really big spenders would score the sought-after cover slot. Money might not physically change hands, but it's widely known that advertisers have to cough up serious bucks to be in with a chance of being on the cover.
However, Lorraine Candy refutes the suggestions that her covers are driven by advertisers. She insists times have changed.
'It's just rubbish,' she says. 'We've used young British designers Giles Deacon and Richard Nicholl on the cover. Neither are advertisers - they just had great dresses.
'The reader is the most important thing, not the advertiser.'
Photo Credits: www.miumiu.com, www.dailymail.co.uk
Content Credit: Dailymail.co.uk
