When I saw recent pictures of new best friends supermodel Karlie Kloss and super-singer Taylor Swift looking pretty identical – the Daily Mail ran the pictures with the caption ‘Morphing into one: After a few months of friendship the singer and model are even starting to look like each other’ – I thought a) that’s creepy, but b) we’ve all been there.

Because we’ve all had one of those all-consuming friendships, haven’t we? A heady year of swapping favourite novels, ordering the same things from menus, cocktails à deux in fancy hotels, minibreaks with no sex, and a merging of personal style so that we come to closely resemble our BFF. 

"As with Karlie and Taylor, our personal style came to be completely interchangeable. We naturally had a predilection for the same stuff but we were definitely influencing each other’s style."

When I was 23, I made a new BFF, India. We became close quickly, sending each other emails that were charming, considered, full of jokes, grammatically correct, intimate. A new text message from India was exhilarating. We went on holiday together. We talked for hours and hours, late into the night, about everything, confiding in each other, cracking each other up, comforting each other. We basically fell in love. I remember one night arriving back at my house after a party and noticing that my then-boyfriend had fallen asleep in the living room. Instead of waking him up, India and I got into my bed – his bed too, we lived together – and left him on the sofa for the night. I don’t think we even covered him with a blanket.

India and I got off on the coincidences of our lives: we had both trained as actresses, we both loved reading, we had even been born mere days apart in the same hospital. ‘We were born in the same hospital, would you believe that?’ we would say in unison when people asked us how we met. ‘But we don’t actually remember meeting as babies,’ we would laugh (looking back, I realise how annoying we must have been). ‘We met properly years later when we kept being sent for the same auditions on account of looking so alike.’ 

We did look quite alike, in fairness, we were both pale with dark hair, slight-ish although she was taller and thinner than me. And quite quickly, as with Karlie and Taylor, our personal style came to be completely interchangeable. We naturally had a predilection for the same stuff but we were definitely influencing each other’s style. Our wardrobes were suddenly full of only slightly different Topshop tea dresses, we both finished our outfits off with berets, we wore similar jewellery and the same eyeliner. When India cut her hair into a bob, I did too. When people who knew us said, ‘Wow you two are looking very alike these days!’ we said, ‘Thanks!’ They smiled wryly. We were behaving like classic Fashion BFF creeps and we didn’t even know it.

"Fashion BFFs, women who share intense friendships and gradually come to closely resemble each other, are everywhere."

But we weren’t the first and we weren’t the last: Fashion BFFs, women who share intense friendships and gradually come to closely resemble each other, are everywhere. You spot the matching twosomes at art galleries and in the supermarket, at restaurants and at yoga classes. You see them on the red carpet. Eva Longoria and Victoria Beckham? Fashion BFFs. Greta Gerwig and Mickey Sumner? Fashion BFFs. Katy Perry and Mia Moretti? Fashion BFFs. Karlie Kloss and Taylor Swift? Total Fashion BFFs.

My Fashion BFF moved to Los Angeles (I was devastated obviously) and now that we live more than 5,000 miles apart, in different time zones, in different climates, with greater responsibilities and mortgages and dogs and all of that, our style is less in sync than it once was. We’re still close though, we’re still Fashion Best Friends Forever.  

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