2025: The year of the naked dress?
By Rachel Tashjian, CNN
(CNN) — The year’s biggest trend was barely there. It crested Margot Robbie in slim strands of beads and rhinestones; it draped Julia Fox, Sandro Botticelli-style, in little more than strands of brunette curls; and, through an empire waisted layer of sheer white mesh, it revealed Sienna Miller’s new pregnancy to the world.
We’re talking, of course, about the naked dress.
In 2025, countless actors, musicians and influencers appeared on red carpets in naked dresses – dresses with fabric so sheer or minimal that the wearer looks as if she’s wearing nothing, or dresses designed to create a trompe l’oieil appearance of nudity.
Why did so many designers make these dresses this year, and why do celebrities continue to reach for them?
Designers say they are expressions of freedom and our changing relationship to nudity. Critics say they are an indulgence of the male gaze. Are naked dresses the parable of the emperor’s new clothes come to life, or a dream-come-true for body positivity?
Liberté, egalité, nudité?
“Any style that comes into fashion is going to be overdetermined, to use a psychoanalytical term – it’s going to be caused by a lot of things,” said Dr. Valerie Steele, the director and chief curator, The Museum at FIT. “There’s no one thing, like the conservative mood sweeping the world politically, or a new form of sexual liberation. Big world historical events are often in the background, as are individuals, like a particular actress. But in between is where you find most of the catalysts for changes in fashion, and that means the world of craft or lifestyle.”
Designers are constantly looking at each other for ideas, noting what peers or rivals make that generates publicity – and this past year, that meant the guaranteed virality of the naked dress, Steele said.
The designers behind many of the most popular variations say they have one goal in mind: to celebrate the power of the woman zipped (or thinly veiled) within.
“The naked dress has never been about exposure for me, it’s about liberation,” LaQuan Smith, the New York-based fashion designer behind several stand-out naked dresses at this year’s Met Gala, wrote in an email. “It’s about a woman choosing to show up exactly as she wants, in full control of her presence. When I design pieces that reveal the body, I’m thinking about confidence as an energy, not a flash.”
Smith’s Met Gala dresses demonstrate his modus operandi: for Halle Berry, he created panels of alternating black liquid-y bugle beads and sheer stretch mesh that fanned into a glorious, lengthy train; and for Ciara, he placed swags of crystals between an hourglass of black matte silk. With their mix of hard lines and softer materials, you could hardly say the women looked vulnerable (or cold).
Marcelo Gaia, who perhaps invented the contemporary form of the naked dress in 2019 when he launched his New York-based brand Mirror Palais, considers the gowns a celebration of femininity, spurred on by models’ reactions in early fittings to dresses made of one layer of fabric, without lining. “A woman’s body is just so beautiful. It’s like, the most perfect creation,” Gaia said. “If you want to make something beautiful, you really don’t have to do that much – you’re just showing what’s there.”
Still, naked dress designers say that provocation is part of the point. Christian Cowan’s crystal T-shirt dress, made in collaboration with designer Elias Matso as the finale look in his Spring-Summer 2026 show, became a sensation when actress and cultural lightning rod Sydney Sweeney wore it to a Variety party in late October. Some on social media criticized her braless, busty appearance as vulgar. “I loved that it was a bit controversial, and it sparked conversations,” said Cowan. “I think anything worthwhile upsets some people.”
Designers sense that women care most about how they feel in a garment, rather than what others may think. “I’m like, what male gaze is there?” he said. “For the most part, I don’t think women are dressing for the male gaze.”
Or, if the male is indeed gazing, he’s doing so uncomfortably. Lily Allen wore a form of the naked dress by Colleen Allen to the CFDAs in early November, coasting off the success of her new album “West End Girl,” widely considered to be a post-mortem account of her estrangement from husband David Harbour. The ensemble undoubtedly carried an attitude of vengefulness, suggesting outrageous confidence and an assurance to anyone watching that she’s doing just fine: she showed the ex-lover who scorned her what he’s missing out on, and invited her sympathetic fans to cheer on her fantastic post-breakup appearance.
Writer and editor Tish Weinstock, who got married in a sheer vintage John Galliano dress, said she hardly feels undressed in naked dresses. “I don’t feel naked at all, because I’m literally wearing clothes. And not just any clothes, but these beautiful, historical relics from the 1930s, eroded over time, or iconic Galliano or Dolce gowns from the 90s,” she said. “For me, it allows me to become a character. I feel more like an apparition than standing there completely starkers”.
In other words, the naked dress allows designers and wearers to challenge our assumptions around a woman’s appearance. “I love the questioning of, why is this taboo?” said Cowan. “A part of a woman’s body shouldn’t be taboo. It should be completely her decision of what she does with that, and then everyone else should be fine.”
The emperor’s new GLP-1
Of course, the wearer, her loyal observers and her ex-boyfriend are not the only people seeing the dress – and no single dress, as Steele points out, has a fixed meaning.
“You cannot put a unifocal interpretation on it, because the same style can mean diametrically different things on one person,” she said. “Meaning is not inherent in the dress. It is created and recreated each time by the wearer, the designer and the viewers as they all try and figure out what it means.”
Steele points to Marie Antoinette popularizing the chemise, the 18th century’s answer to the naked dress, as an instructive example. “It was caused in part by the fall of the old regime and the revolution,” she said, plus the new availability of cotton through the growth of the American slave trade, and a trending interest in Grecian gowns that promoted liberty as a core social value.
Nonetheless, it is impossible to see the rise of the naked dress as extricable from the boom in GLP-1 usage, even if designers like Allen, Gaia, Smith, Cowan and Dilara Findikoglu, the maker of Fox’s Botticelli dress, have been making these dresses since the heyday of the body positivity movement (even if that was only three years ago). Modern body-skimming dresses first emerged in the 1920s and 1930s, when designers like Madeleine Vionnet and Coco Chanel created bias- cut gowns that clung to the figure, with shorter hemlines that showed off the legs. In the background, fascism was beginning its ascent across Europe, and the oppression of liberal values and a focus on the newly slim, physically disciplined body seemed to play off each other.
As conservative ideals once again take hold and the figures of celebrities seem to shrink, the body seems to risk becoming a fashion trend unto itself, rather than any clothing style or silhouette. Even as many of the naked dress’s designers put a range of body types in their clothes – and in fact, the designers discussed here are some of the few who remain committed to body diversity in their runway casting – those who most often wear naked dresses tend to be thin.
Gaia believes that the prevalence of thin women in such dresses is not only due to GLP-1s, but the expense of creating and marketing plus size clothing through fitting and ecommerce imagery. (Gaia offers up to a size 18/20.) “It’s very complicated, and it’s not just Ozempic that is playing a role,” he said. “One hundred percent, white supremacy, thinness, its adjacencies – like that is playing a role. But it really also comes down to money.”
Is the naked dress here to stay? Perhaps that depends on how you interpret the year’s most naked dress of all: the scrap of nude nylon worn by Bianca Censori at February’s Grammys. You had to squint to the see the lines of the dress itself, and nearly every outlet ran pictures of her at the event blurred.
“The relative nakedness of the female body can either be perceived, and/or intended as liberating, or perceived as objectifying,” said Steele. “Some of the girlfriends of famous people who appear semi-nude next to them on the red carpet, you kind of go, I think she is presenting herself as a sexual object for her partner. In other cases, you think, she is so in charge of what she thinks she’s doing.”
Was Censori merely a sexual prop for a public eager to see female nudity while purporting to revile it? Or was she so in charge? The naked truth may be both.
The-CNN-Wire
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