Is the Reign of the Naked Dress Ending?

Style Points is a column about how fashion intersects with the wider world.

Two years ago, Irina Shayk stepped out at the Cannes Film Festival in her underwear. Well, sort of. The supermodel was daringly clad in Gucci-monogrammed lingerie with a sheer overlay. It was the same season that designers like Rick Owens, LaQuan Smith, and even the ever-demure Tory Burch were showcasing sheer looks on the runway, as fashion embraced look-at-me body-consciousness post-lockdown.

This year’s Cannes fashion has been a more subdued affair (Shayk wore floor-length Armani Privé). A much-talked-about dress code was announced that implicitly banned the naked dress, a former staple of the festival’s step-and-repeat. (“For decency reasons, nudity is prohibited on the red carpet, as well as in any other area of the festival,” the official statement reads.) And while the additional rules banning long trains seem to have gone out the window, for the most part, people seem to be playing by the “decency”-driven rules. Juror Halle Berry stepped out in a Chanel skirt suit, while Julia Garner wore a Gucci gown that was sheer, but lined, in keeping with the dress code. Even Bella Hadid, whose past looks have been the talk of Cannes, kept things fairly PG this go-round.

Halle Berry in Chanel at the Cannes Film Festival.

While Cannes is merely one event on the A-lister merry-go-round, its red carpet so far appears to reflect a more staid take on fashion—one shaped by a rise in social conservatism, a renewed nostalgia for retro silhouettes, and perhaps a general exhaustion with the trend of baring it all. Is this an extinction-level event for the naked dress?

Look at this year’s awards season, where you were less likely to see people in X-ray vision mesh and more likely to spot young stars donning the retro, sweetheart-necklined garb of their ’50s and early ’60s predecessors (in some cases, literally, as with Elle Fanning and her custom re-creation of a 1953 Balmain gown).

Elle Fanning at the Golden Globes.

When our feeds are clogged with tradwife content and retrograde takes on gender, the policing of what women wear and the retreat to all things modest feels unsurprising, part of a calculated cultural withdrawal into the mythic past.

It’s also possible that the garment has just lost its power to shock (after all, how many Daily Mail headlines can the ecosystem sustain?). Or that Ozempic and other GLP-1 drugs have changed our relationship to showing off. A decade ago, I wrote about the idea of the couture body, in which “the body is the new outfit. The gym is the new atelier. Curves and indentations that were once sculpted by corsetry, boning, panniers, strategic padding, or even, more recently, Spanx are now squarely in evidence.” Since then, the pendulum has swung back to the Y2K era, with extreme thinness prized above all else. If the new ideal body is not so hard-won and increasingly attainable, is showcasing it in the same way really a priority?

Jeremy Strong at the Cannes Film Festival.

Amid all the drama about what actresses can and can’t wear while promoting their films, it’s worth noting that there are no similar restrictions for men’s clothing. If you ask me, Jeremy Strong in a pink bucket hat and matching corduroy leisure suit feels more objectionable than one more illusion-netted gown.