here, there & everywhere; With the latest best dresses, ubiquity beats anonymity.

Byline: Florence Kane

There's a certain Chanel dress that kept popping up everywhere this summer. You know the one: white cotton with slim red, blue, and green horizontal stripes, square neckline, and fluted sleeves. Princess Caroline of Monaco wore it in Rome during Valentino's forty-fifth-anniversary celebrations, Katie Holmes took it out on the town in Madrid, Michelle Wie walked the red carpet in it at the Spider-Man 3 premiere in Tokyo, and Olivia Chantecaille wore hers (over black leggings) in New York to the opening night of the Edith Piaf biopic La Vie en Rose.

Seeing photos of celebrities or social women in the same frock is nothing new. Who wore what and when (and sometimes who looked better in it) is a matter of weekly discussion in newspapers and magazines. But this Chanel dress was just one of many that seemed to be everywhere-Phillip Lim's spring-summer rosette T-shirt dress and Tracy Feith's bright smock had their own stretches of omnipresence. Before that, the It dress was a little leopard-spotted DKNY number, shot on Kate Moss by Bruce Weber for the November 2006 issue of Vogue.

Why all the ubiquity? What happened to the embarrassment _prompted by showing up somewhere in the same dress as another woman? How have we overcome the deep-seated fear that the other woman might look better?

To understand the phenomenon, one has to know what makes a piece a candidate for ubiquity. A straightforward list: It must be flattering to wearers of different shapes and a range of ages (Katie Holmes is 28; Princess Caroline, 50); it is most often bought, not borrowed; and it is not a major red-carpet dress (no one wants to win a Golden Globe in the same dress a younger starlet wore to the after-party a few years before).

I wanted to get stylist Tina Chai's take on the situation after I saw her in-what else?-the striped Chanel dress, which she wore to an August party to celebrate Peter Som's new position as _creative director of Bill Blass. (To be fair, Chai grabbed the dress at the last minute from the closet of her friend Gretchen Gunlocke Fenton, executive director for PR for Chanel, unaware of its storied past-though a woman at the gathering was kind enough to point it out, asking, "Isn't that the dress Katie Holmes wore to the beach?")

Still, as a stylist with celebrity clients and a fixture on the fashion social scene, Chai really gets the ubiquitous dress. "It's like those CFDA dresses from the Gap," she says, referring to the white ones designed by Fashion Fund participants Doo.Ri, Thakoon, and Rodarte that sold at lightning speed, securing their place in ubiquity history. "I saw them everywhere on everyone," says Chai. "They are so simple that you can really put ...