When Sienna Spiro took the VMA stage in a silver minidress made of metal plates, the reference to Paco Rabanne was unmistakable. I first thought of Françoise Hardy, one of the artists who helped make his creations famous in the 1960s and whom Sienna herself has named as a style influence. But a closer look at the outfit she wore to perform “Great Expectation” brings another image to mind: Sylvie Vartan singing in a silver Rabanne dress in 1991.

The story began before either of them wore it. In 1966, Rabanne presented a collection of twelve dresses in Paris that he called “unwearable.” Rather than cutting and sewing fabric, he joined pieces of plastic with metal rings. It was a different way of constructing clothing, devised by someone who had studied architecture and begun his career designing accessories. In the years that followed, aluminum plates and metal mesh also entered his work, producing dresses that looked like jewelry and armor at once.

Françoise Hardy wore several versions of that idea, but none became as famous as the piece created for her in 1968. Made from a thousand gold plates, with 300 carats of diamonds at the collar, the minidress was presented at a diamond exhibition in Paris and dubbed “the world’s most expensive dress.” According to British Vogue, it took 2,000 hours to make. Hardy appeared with armed security and was photographed alongside Rabanne and Salvador Dalí, in a scene where the garment’s brilliance and extravagance contrasted with her understated presence.

So how many copies of that dress were made? There is no reliable count. The gold piece was created especially for Hardy, but Rabanne designed many other dresses made from discs and plates joined by rings. A 1967 aluminum example is now in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. There are original pieces, later designs from the house and reinterpretations that evoke Hardy’s image without reproducing the dress she wore.

Sylvie Vartan holds a special place in this story. For her return to the stage in 1991, she wore a metallic Rabanne creation that recalled an outfit worn by Hardy, her friend. In the photograph, we see the silver plates, wide straps, and short silhouette of a dress made to be seen in performance. That meeting of metal and music is what reappears most clearly in Sienna’s outfit. More recently, Gigi Hadid took a different route with a gold version that more directly recalled Hardy’s famous dress.

The look Agro Studio created for Sienna has been linked to a Rabanne design from 1967. It is not a copy of Sylvie’s dress, just as Sylvie’s was not a copy of Hardy’s gold one. Still, placing the images side by side shows why the invention continues to appeal to singers. The plates catch the light, move with the body and make the clothes part of the performance.

For Sienna, the choice also fits the identity she has been building. Her hair, makeup and many of her musical references point back to the 1960s; Hardy is among the women whose style she admires. The silver dress could have been a striking homage and little more, but it looked entirely like her. Rabanne imagined clothes for a woman of the future. Almost sixty years later, Sienna stepped onto the stage and gave that woman her own voice.