Somewhere between “Is she wearing that has turned the red carpet into a dermatological showcase. This attempt to rebrand the oldest state of existence makes an appearance every few fashion cycles. You would think with all its milestone moments—like when Cher turned this sparkly game of déjà vu into a sport through the ’70s or Kate Moss unwittingly turned gauze into a statement of nonchalance in 1993—we’d be tired of the discussion past the point of Rihanna’s Swarovski exorcism of fabric in 2014.
Yet here we are, over a decade later, still mystified in the comments section. In 2025, the red carpet has come to expect—no, demand—at least one naked dress, thanks to laser-cutting techniques on fabric, Ozempic and the unshakeable confidence of women who exfoliate twice a day.
Like every great piece of performance art, the naked dress evolved—or rather, dissolved—into a fine craft. It’s the sartorial equivalent of a rumour. Mystery, after all, thrives on the suggestion of what lies beneath, not what’s on display. The naked dress sits at the intersection of concealment and revelation; it holds your gaze without fully surrendering to it.
“To look at its history is to watch our cultural comfort with the body evolve,” says Shefalee Vasudev, journalist and author of Stories We Wear: Status, Spectacle and The Politics of Appearance. The obsession with body types has shifted over time, she notes, from Twiggy’s angular, waif-like figure to Naomi Campbell’s statuesque supermodel frame to the “Kim” body of sculpted curves and surgical precision.
“While the anatomy is constant, the ideal of it mutates,” says Vasudev. What we worship simply reflects our era’s insecurities and aspirations. What we, as a culture, have come to accept, adore or condemn seems to only change on the basis of when it’s presented to us. Laura Harrier’s look at Vogue World: Hollywood in October—a skimpy, modern reimagining of the flapper dress—was a full-circle moment, for a century ago, it was the flapper dress that announced, with all the subtlety of a champagne pop, that women would wear whatever they pleased, society be damned.
“There are two things every wearer of the naked dress has in common,” Vasudev says. “They’re comfortable with their bodies and they want attention.” At their core, she insists, they’re all the same species even though there is a difference in how the world perceives them. At the 1998 MTV VMAs, Rose McGowan used the naked dress to reclaim agency over her body, the first public protest against Harvey Weinstein’s sexual misconduct, though the disgraced producer would only be convicted of his various crimes more than two decades later. Florence Pugh’s visible nipples are somehow a provocation, while Emily Ratajkowski’s are expected. The naked dress might not really disrobe its wearer, but it does expose everyone who is watching.
Still, not everyone’s buying into it. The current overexposure has certainly killed the shock value—I can’t help but wonder if we’ve run out of ideas or simply fabric. It’s ‘The Emperor’s New Clothes’, reimagined for the Met Gala. “The nude dress trend, apart from being an oxymoron, commodifies feminism, throwing up the challenges of what happens when we yo-yo between female empowerment and the male gaze,” says veteran fashion journalist Bandana Tewari.
