Carys Douglas stepped out in her mother’s decades-old Gucci lace top at a Manhattan party this week.
The 23-year-old daughter of Catherine Zeta-Jones, 55, and Michael Douglas, 80, wore the black Tom Ford-era piece to the Gucci x Moda Operandi event in New York City on Wednesday night. She paired the see-through top with a miniskirt and tights for the cameras.
Zeta-Jones originally debuted the daring look at the 1996 premiere of “The Long Kiss Goodnight,” a full three years before her daughter was born. The actress styled it more conservatively at the time, layering a black tube top underneath and adding matching black lace pants.
This marks at least the third time Douglas has mined her mother’s wardrobe for high-profile occasions. Last fall, she attended the PAC NYC Icons of Culture Gala with her father in a black slip dress that Zeta-Jones had worn in 2005, two decades earlier. For her 21st birthday in 2024, she chose a vintage pink Ungaro slip dress from 1999, another piece originally worn by her mother.
The repeated raids on Zeta-Jones’s closet place Douglas among a growing cohort of celebrity offspring turning to their parents’ archives rather than current collections. The trend has drawn notice as so-called “nepo babies” increasingly surface in vintage pieces with direct family provenance.
The Gucci x Moda Operandi event drew fashion insiders to New York for a celebration of the brand’s archival and contemporary designs. Douglas’s choice of a piece from the Tom Ford era of Gucci, which ran from 1994 to 2004, underscored the continued cultural pull of that period.
Neither Douglas nor Zeta-Jones has publicly commented on the latest wardrobe loan through their social media channels.
The mother-daughter style parallels have become a recurring thread in coverage of Douglas’s public appearances. Each instance has involved pieces from the late 1990s or early 2000s, a period when Zeta-Jones was establishing herself as a major Hollywood star following her breakthrough in “The Mask of Zorro” and her Oscar-winning turn in “Chicago.”
The 1996 premiere of “The Long Kiss Goodnight” came early in that rise, with the action thriller starring Geena Davis and directed by Renny Harlin representing a major studio release for the actress. Zeta-Jones’s choice of the lace Gucci look for that red carpet established her early fashion credentials.
Douglas’s own emerging public profile has combined these fashion moments with appearances alongside her parents at cultural events. The PAC NYC Icons of Culture Gala last fall, where she wore her mother’s 2005 slip dress, marked one such occasion with her father.
The repeated vintage choices suggest a deliberate approach to public dressing that leverages her mother’s established archive rather than relying solely on contemporary styling or brand relationships.
