Remember the one where all the friends minus Phoebe went to London and Joey wore a union jack hat and Chandler didn’t want to hang out with him until he took it off? Well, Chandler had a point, because literal dressing – where you make your clothes speak literally to the occasion you are dressing for – can be, well, a bit much. Cut to now and Joey’s literal dressing has found its match in Melania Trump, also headed to London, baby. As she boarded Air Force One on Sunday evening, she wore a $4,400 (£3,500) Gucci dress emblazoned with images of Tower Bridge, the Big Ben clock tower and a double-decker bus.

It might be up for discussion whether homing in on a woman’s outfit is unfeminist, but then not many people would wear an outfit decorated with the landmarks of their soon-to-be host country. Imagine Philip May wearing a shirt covered in tiny White Houses to visit DC, or your pal on board an easyJet to Paris wearing a shirt covered in Eiffel Towers and you get the gist. That Balenciaga – the brand big on memes, which used Joey Tribbiani as its muse for autumn/winter 2018 – has created a “souvenir bumbag” decorated with the kind of keyrings you might pick up on French exchange, of le Tour Eifel and the Arc de Triomphe, says it all.

The Duchess of Cambridge is another fan of dressing for the occasion. She has been known to match her outfits to the flags of the countries she is visiting. She wore red, black and gold on a trip to Germany and white and red while in Poland. At the Chelsea flower show last month, she wore a floral Erdem dress.

This isn’t the first time Trump has attempted to match her wardrobe to her schedule. In October last year her outfits on a trip to a handful of African countries were criticised for being, to put it mildly, a little too on-the-nose. Hadley Freeman wrote at the time that Trump was “doing her Out of Africa cosplay tour” . This included outfit highlights such as a pith helmet and, on a visit to the Giza pyramids, a suit that drew comparisons to Belloq, the villain from Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark.

When done well, literal dressing can be a knowing nod, a way to have fun with fashion and engage with your surroundings. See Lupita Nyong’o’s American Psycho-inspired red carpet look around the release of slashtastic Jordan Peele horror Us, or the warrior-like jewelled gold harness she wore to the premiere of Black Panther. Then there’s Villanelle visiting Oxford, in season two of Killing Eve, wearing an outfit that the Brideshead lads would have fawned over: high-waisted beige chinos, a crisp white shirt and cricket jumper slung insouciantly over the shoulders, rather than, say, a fascinator in the shape of a stack of library books. The only thing missing is Aloysius. She is channelling her fusty inner Oxford don when we know she is anything but. Because that’s the key to literal dressing: being playful, provocative and subversive. It is not making a beeline for Big Ben.