15 hours ago
'Criminally hot': Celebrities can't get enough of the bandage dress comeback
It was, well, bound to happen.
Some 15 years after its last renaissance, the bandage dress, that item of clothing invented in the mid-1980s that makes the wearer look as if she has been sucked into a tube, shrink-wrapped and excreted back into the world, is once again resurgent – just as it is every time the twin forces of body culture and economic gloom combine.
And with it comes the debate about whether the dress is ultimately about objectification or self-empowerment.
The trend returned in earnest last September, when Kaia Gerber wore a white bandage dress recreated by Herve Leger to mimic the white bandage dress worn by her mother, Cindy Crawford, to the Oscars in 1993 with Richard Gere.
In January, influencer Olivia Boblet posted a TikTok showing herself in a Herve Leger bandage dress, which now has 1.7 million views and more than 1,000 comments (most of them essentially reading 'finally!').
Then, in April, Hailey Bieber wore a Saint Laurent bandage dress to the Fashion Trust US awards, doubling down on the style in early June with a vintage Herve Leger number.
'Criminally hot,' Kim Russell, aka the Kimbino, wrote when she reposted a picture of Bieber on Instagram in the vintage look.
Bieber responded, 'Herve bandage dresses are back I fear.'
Hailey Bieber attends the Fashion Trust US Awards wearing a bandage dress. via AFP Read more: Fashion collections bring back iconic designs, proving nostalgia sells
Part of this reemergence is down to the House of CB, a British brand that made its name by introducing the bandage dress to a new generation in 2010, and reintroduced it as part of its birthday celebrations last month.
Part of it has to do with Herve Leger itself. The brand that popularised the look will celebrate its 40th anniversary in September and has gleefully embraced the bandage resurgence.
'So much of the new generation that's discovering the brand for the first time wants to get dressed up, yearns for connection and going out,' said Michelle Ochs, the Herve Leger creative director.
And the bandage dress, which was first the supermodel dress and then the "it-girl dress", is also the ultimate clubbing dress.
'It's aspirational,' said Law Roach, the 'image architect' who is such a fan of the style he had his own collaboration with the house of Herve Leger a few years ago featuring (yes) bandage dresses.
But as much as the return of the bandage dress is being framed in the language of fun or nostalgia, it is also all wrapped up in the Ozempic-inspired rise of a new form of body consciousness and diet culture.
Not to mention a political climate in which cartoonish versions of femininity are the preferred paradigm.
It is a way of dressing backward, at a time when it can seem as if society itself is going backward.
Though often attributed to the Herve Leger label, the bandage dress was actually invented by Azzedine Alaia, who showed his first bandage dresses on the runway in the early 1980s as a riposte to the more exaggerated power dressing that was in vogue at the time.
Unlike the battering ram shoulders and besuited armour of Thierry Mugler, Alaia's dress, which was inspired by Egyptian mummies, offered a different kind of physical assertion, one that celebrated the female figure while also protecting it.
It was such a pivot that, in 1985, not long after the first bandage dresses were shown, Alaia was chosen as the 'creator of the year' at the Oscar De La Mode awards in France (a short-lived event created by Jack Lang, then the country's culture minister).
He accepted his award with his date, Grace Jones, who wore a fuchsia version of the bandage dress. The New York Times christened it 'the sexy mummy look', which wasn't only about ancient funeral rites.
The Herve Leger version was introduced in the early 1990s.
While Alaia's bandage dresses, which were knit from a stretchy viscose, were relatively soft – they moulded the body and wrapped it, rather than constricting it – the Herve Leger version 'really did feel like an Ace bandage', Crawford said.
For all that it celebrated the female form, the dress also moulded and constrained it – sometimes, Crawford acknowledged, pretty painfully.
Nevertheless, she said, 'the models all gravitated to it'.
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Linda Evangelista, Iman, Naomi Campbell – they all wore bandage dresses.
'It was a chic way to show your body, but not trashy,' Crawford said.
Aerobics was on the rise at the time, and the dress was a way to show the hard work that went into your body. And it was a way to differentiate your body from the bodies that couldn't get into the bandage dress.
It may be worth noting that this time around, despite all the social media enthusiasm and the fact that, according to Katy Lubin, a spokesperson for the fashion search engine Lyst, the House of CB sold 15,000 units the first day of its bandage revival in May, actual data suggests that the dresses are not being consumed at the level they are being celebrated.
'Overall volume is still pretty low, although we have seen demand increase by 2% in the last three months,' Lubin said.
'Bandage dresses generate strong reactions, and content creators understand that divisive stories drive comments, shares and algorithmic reach in ways that universally beloved items simply don't.'
In other words, when it comes to the bandage dress, it is possible, she said, that 'the controversy itself is the commodity'. – ©2025 The New York Times Company
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
