In the past year, Amal Clooney has made a name for herself following rules we thought we no longer had. Her clothing always seems to hit a remarkably precise note: her dress for the fashion industry’s most “insider” night, the Metropolitan Museum of Art Costume Institute Gala, was a red, asymmetrically tiered gown with a studded bodice designed by John Galliano for Maison Margiela—fittingly cerebral and high fashion. Her black, one-shouldered Dior gown and white gloves for this year’s Golden Globes appeared pointedly Old Hollywood. When she goes out to meet friends for dinner or drinks, we know she’s doing just that: she wears funky feathers and Giambattista Valli bell-bottoms, say. And Amal doesn’t simply see the style potential in typical paparazzi moments: take the white tweed Chanel suit she wore to visit the Acropolis to campaign for the return of the Elgin Marbles from the British Museum.

In this desk-to-dinner, sweatpants-on-the-red-carpet world, Amal is doing something truly unusual that made her compulsively watchable: she is the last woman standing who dresses for the occasion. (It was this refreshing sensibility for clothing that landed her on this year’s International Best-Dressed List.) “Amal has caught the world’s attention not just because she captured the seemingly uncatchable George Clooney, but because she’s a fashion adventurer who always manages to strike the right tone, no matter where in the world she is,” wrote Bergdorf Goodman fashion director Linda Fargo in an e-mail. “She manages to effortlessly walk that tightrope between appropriateness and unpredictability, both confounding a beautiful. Not easy!”

But are we watching Amal because we are charmed by this gesture toward a bygone era of glamour, or is there, in fact, something modern to Amal’s many costume changes? “I think it’s both a throwback, a nod to the roles women had to play via their clothing in other times and other cultures,” says Vanity Fair’s special correspondent Amy Fine Collins, one of the keepers of the Best-Dressed List. “But [it’s] also sort of a modern embracing of the possibility of what you can communicate with clothes, because we are in such a visual world.”

Indeed, as Amal crafts each moment of her life into a fashion opportunity—an inevitably of marrying one of the world’s biggest movie stars is that she is photographed doing just about everything—she reminds of us of her multiple roles as human-rights lawyer, visiting professor, philanthropist, socialite, and, yes, Hollywood wife. She uses couture like a uniform, harnessing what seem like the impracticalities of fashion into just the opposite.

Take, for example, her white gloves at this year’s Golden Globes, which left the whole entire world (well, it seemed) split between whether they were a precious conjuring of a black-and-white Hollywood golden age or the misstep of a red-carpet outsider. In fact, they accomplished something of both: “One, she didn’t have to get a manicure,” says costume designer Alison Freer, who also recently published How to Get Dressed, a style guide. “And two, she beautifully got to sidestep the whole brouhaha [of] the E! channel Mani-Cam. Talk about practical.”

And therein may lie one of Amal’s secrets: she makes the practical seem decadent. “I mean, things got so mixed up in fashion,” Collins says. “I remember last year at the F.I.T. Couture Council lunch . . . it’s a lunch, and women were showing up in sequins. Or at fashion shows in the daytime, women are showing up in evening clothes because they know they’re going to be photographed and they want a little eye-catching glitz and glamour. . . . Maybe it’s a refreshing change for women to be able to see what the distinction between day and night and work and play and private and public can be.”

American women are given a kind of style memo: either try to find an all-encompassing grail ensemble that can take you from meetings to after-work social functions, or steer clear of the dark, confounding cloud of “business casual” by mixing sweatpants with heels for a night out or sequin skirts with blazers for the office. This brand of irreverence has long given J. Crew its juice, and has been a major force in women’s style, but after several years, perhaps Amal’s emergence is a signal that this trick is losing its potency (J. Crew, tellingly,has had a difficult past year).

But is Amal actually affecting the way women dress and shop? For Fargo, the potential is there, but it’s something more than her clothes: “She’s clearly seized the moment, and could very well be on her way to becoming one of the great style icons of our day,” Fargo wrote in an e-mail. “And not just because of what she chooses to wear, but because underneath the clothes, we admire her intelligence, activism, globalism, and her clear confidence in her own skin.” Freer, for her part, sees Amal’s high-fashion wardrobe of Giambattista Valli frocks and Dolce & Gabbana vintage (not to mention her Oscar de la Renta wedding dress) difficult to emulate. “I think Amal has that sort of impossibly chic, European, French-schooled vibe about her that definitely seems inaccessible,” she says.

Still, Collins says it may be too soon to tell, as the tides in fashion have shifted so far in the opposite direction. “I would say the Amal effect would be hard to register this early, but it’s something to watch and see,” she says. “Most of all, I think she doesn’t want it forgotten that she works.”