From Rose McGowan to Florence Pugh: The influence of the naked dress throughout time
The trend has been around since the 1920s and continues to make an appearance on the catwalk and red carpet
The naked dressing is nothing new. Here we can see singer and dancer Bunty Pain, one of Cecil B Cochran's chorus girls, wearing a diaphanous dress in 1929.When actress Carroll Baker appeared in a revealing evening gown by Balmain at the 1964 premiere of ‘The Carpetbaggers’ at Piccadilly Circus, she was swamped by fans who tried to break the security cordon.In the late 1960s, Spanish-French designer Paco Rabanne created dresses that reflected a world that had been revolutionized by the space age and the sexual liberation movement.The pop provocation of the 1960s gave way to more sophisticated designs that played on the idea of the “perverse” bourgeoisie, a figure who was modest in public, but brazen in private. This design by British designer Zandra Rhodes is an example of this playful double standard that Tom Ford would take up decades later in his early days at Gucci.The celebrities of the 1990s embraced the trend of naked dressing and turned into a kind of protofeminist statement, one that said: “This is my body and I do with what I want with it.” But they did so while maintaining a sense of spectacle. In this image, we see actress Rose McGowan arriving at the 1998 MTV Video Music Awards, accompanied by her partner at the time, singer Marilyn Manson. Years later, McGowan would be one of the most vocal figures of the #MeToo movement against sexual harassment.In 1994, Madonna wore a naked dress to Wesley Snipes' birthday party. At that point, the singer had already scandalized the Church with her song 'Like a Prayer' and the whole world more generally with her Blonde Ambition Tour and daring coffee table book 'Sex.’In 2019, 20 years after appearing in a naked dress at the MTV Video Music Awards, Rose McGowan chose another revealing gown to attend the Q Awards, the UK’s annual music awards run by the music magazine ‘Q.’In 2014, Rihanna brought the naked dress back in full form with this spectacular gown made entirely of Swarovski crystals, which she wore to the CFDA Fashion Awards in New York.In 2022, the naked dress reached new heights. During the Cannes Film Festival in May, the companion of Australian model Jordan Barrett turned heads for her semi-sheer gown.The trend was also seen outside the runway shows of the world's major fashion weeks. In this photo, influencer Alicia Coscarelli wears a naked dress during the Copenhagen Fashion Week in August.
But it was actress Florence Pugh who has brought naked dressing back to the fore. She caused a stir last summer, when she appeared in a sheer, fuchsia pink ballgown to Valentino’s couture show in Rome. “Thank you again, my beautiful team, for making my pink princess dreams come true,” Pugh wrote in a message on her Instagram account, which has 8.4 million followers.The Australian actress was quick to hit back at the insults she received over the Valentino dress. “What’s been interesting to watch and witness is just how easy it is for men to totally destroy a woman’s body, publicly, proudly, for everyone to see,” she posted on her Instagram story.
Pugh, who is well known in Hollywood for her strong feminist stance, was not to be dissuaded by the naysayers. In September, she appeared in another sheer outfit at the Valentino after party after the brand's Paris Fashion Week show. She shared a photo of her look on Instagram, with the message: “Trust the button.”
Last week, it was Olivia Wilde, the director of ‘Don't Worry Darling,’ which stars Pugh, who decided to embrace the naked dressing trend with an Alexandre Vauthier design at the Academy Museum Gala in Los Angeles. As Vanessa Friedmann says in her piece for the 'New York Times,' "Five years after the explosive #MeToo moment, in the twilight of Roe, the subject of women’s bodies, how they are seen — and who gets to decide exactly how much of them is seen — has ever more political potency.”
