There’s no denying the forever power of the best naked dresses. It’s a garment that has turned heads and made history for centuries. The dress itself comes in many different designs, but the overall concept is simple: to reveal without fully revealing, whether through sheer fabrics, cut-outs, or skin-tight creations.
And for whatever reason, it’s everywhere in new, surrealist forms for spring and fall 2022. Labels like Puppets and Puppets, Schiaparelli, Sinead Gorey, and Y/Project are all currently experimenting with the concept, whether that means gilded sculpted boobs, thermal body prints, or trompe l’oeil nipples. Olivia Rodrigo even exemplified the new take on the trend in her custom Vivienne Westwood gown worn to the Grammys, a pink glitter airbrushed outline of the body rendered on her sculpturesque black gown.
“When I launched the whole concept, there were so many people freaking out about it even before it was on the runway,” Glenn Martens says of his fall 2022 creations for Y/Project, inspired by a classic Jean Paul Gaultier archival print. “Because there was this kind of nudity, maybe certain markets would ban it or whatever.” In 2022, there are few garments that still have that shock power, and it turns out these new naked dresses are one of them: “If I put a guy’s chest naked on the catwalk, nobody talks about it. When it’s breasts, it’s like the whole drama,” adds Martens.
Marten’s dresses will undoubtedly make their own celebrity appearance since the roots of the naked dress are very much centered around stardom, from Old Hollywood to the very memorable red carpet moments of Cher, Rihanna, and Rose McGowan. Yet its origins go back as far as the silent film era, according to the fashion historian Michelle Tolini Finamore. “In the 1910s, burgeoning film industry cinema stars such as Theda Bara, Leatrice Joy, and Olive Borden wore dresses that, typical of the era, included very diaphanous, sheer layers of fabric that often revealed more than they concealed,” she explains. “And Cecil B. DeMille was famous for his ‘bathtub’ scenes as well as extravagant spectacles such as ‘Male and Female’ of 1919 with Gloria Swanson in ‘barely there’ dresses.”
Fast forward to the 1950s and beyond, and the world was greeted by a pivotal icon, and arbiter of the naked dress: Marilyn Monroe. She often wore translucent dresses dripping in rhinestones and beads by the designer Jean Louis who dubbed them “illusion” dresses. The most famous occasion was, of course, when she wore one during her birthday serenade to John F. Kennedy in 1962 at Madison Square Garden. Ever the trendsetter, Monroe inspired her peers. “Marlene Dietrich was so enamored of Marilyn’s dress that she had a copy made by Jean Louis for her cabaret singing performances,” adds Finamore. “It is absolutely spectacular with ingenious construction and carefully placed rhinestones that cover in just the right places.”
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