The yr’s biggest pattern was barely there. It crested Margot Robbie in slim strands of beads and rhinestones; it draped Julia Fox, Sandro Botticelli-style, in little greater than strands of brunette curls; and, by means of an empire waisted layer of sheer white mesh, it revealed Sienna Miller’s new being pregnant to the world.
We’re speaking, in fact, about the naked costume.
In 2025, numerous actors, musicians and influencers appeared on red carpets in naked attire – attire with material so sheer or minimal that the wearer looks as if she’s sporting nothing, or attire designed to create a trompe l’oieil look of nudity.
Why did so many designers make these attire this yr, and why do celebrities proceed to succeed in for them?
Designers say they’re expressions of freedom and our altering relationship to nudity. Critics say they’re an indulgence of the male gaze. Are naked attire the parable of the emperor’s new garments come to life, or a dream-come-true for physique positivity?
“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,” stated 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 consistently taking a look at one another for concepts, noting what friends or rivals make that generates publicity – and this previous yr, that meant the assured virality of the naked costume, Steele stated.
See why 2025 was the yr of the naked costume
The designers behind lots of the hottest variations say they’ve one objective in thoughts: to rejoice the energy of the girl zipped (or thinly veiled) inside.
“The naked dress has never been about exposure for me, it’s about liberation,” LaQuan Smith, the New York-based clothier behind a number of stand-out naked attire at this yr’s Met Gala, wrote in an e-mail. “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 attire show his modus operandi: for Halle Berry, he created panels of alternating black liquid-y bugle beads and sheer stretch mesh that fanned into an excellent, prolonged practice; and for Ciara, he positioned swags of crystals between an hourglass of black matte silk. With their mixture of laborious traces and softer supplies, you may hardly say the ladies seemed weak (or chilly).
Marcelo Gaia, who maybe invented the up to date type of the naked costume in 2019 when he launched his New York-based model Mirror Palais, considers the robes a celebration of femininity, spurred on by fashions’ reactions in early fittings to attire made of 1 layer of material, with out lining. “A woman’s body is just so beautiful. It’s like, the most perfect creation,” Gaia stated. “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 costume designers say that provocation is a part of the level. Christian Cowan’s crystal T-shirt costume, made in collaboration with designer Elias Matso as the finale look in his Spring-Summer 2026 present, grew to become a sensation when actress and cultural lightning rod Sydney Sweeney wore it to a Variety social gathering in late October. Some on social media criticized her braless, busty look as vulgar. “I loved that it was a bit controversial, and it sparked conversations,” stated Cowan. “I think anything worthwhile upsets some people.”
Designers sense that ladies care most about how they really feel in a garment, relatively than what others might imagine. “I’m like, what male gaze is there?” he stated. “For the most part, I don’t think women are dressing for the male gaze.”
Or, if the male is certainly gazing, he’s doing so uncomfortably. Lily Allen wore a type of the naked costume by Colleen Allen to the CFDAs in early November, coasting off the success of her new album “West End Girl,” broadly thought of to be a autopsy account of her estrangement from husband David Harbour. The ensemble undoubtedly carried an perspective of vengefulness, suggesting outrageous confidence and an assurance to anybody watching that she’s doing simply nice: she confirmed the ex-lover who scorned her what he’s lacking out on, and invited her sympathetic followers to cheer on her unbelievable post-breakup look.
Writer and editor Tish Weinstock, who obtained married in a sheer classic John Galliano costume, stated she hardly feels undressed in naked attire. “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 stated. “For me, it allows me to become a character. I feel more like an apparition than standing there completely starkers”.
In different phrases, the naked costume permits designers and wearers to problem our assumptions round a lady’s look. “I love the questioning of, why is this taboo?” stated 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.”
Of course, the wearer, her loyal observers and her ex-boyfriend will not be the solely individuals seeing the costume – and no single costume, as Steele factors out, has a hard and fast that means.
“You cannot put a unifocal interpretation on it, because the same style can mean diametrically different things on one person,” she stated. “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 factors to Marie Antoinette popularizing the chemise, the 18th century’s reply to the naked costume, as an instructive instance. “It was caused in part by the fall of the old regime and the revolution,” she stated, plus the new availability of cotton by means of the development of the American slave commerce, and a trending curiosity in Grecian robes that promoted liberty as a core social worth.
Nonetheless, it’s unimaginable to see the rise of the naked costume as extricable from the growth in GLP-1 utilization, even when designers like Allen, Gaia, Smith, Cowan and Dilara Findikoglu, the maker of Fox’s Botticelli costume, have been making these attire since the heyday of the physique positivity motion (even when that was solely three years in the past). Modern body-skimming attire first emerged in the Nineteen Twenties and Thirties, when designers like Madeleine Vionnet and Coco Chanel created bias- reduce robes that clung to the determine, with shorter hemlines that confirmed off the legs. In the background, fascism was starting its ascent throughout Europe, and the oppression of liberal values and a give attention to the newly slim, bodily disciplined physique appeared to play off one another.
As conservative beliefs as soon as once more take maintain and the figures of celebrities appear to shrink, the physique appears to danger turning into a vogue pattern unto itself, relatively than any clothes type or silhouette. Even as lots of the naked costume’s designers put a variety of physique varieties of their garments – and actually, the designers mentioned listed here are a few of the few who stay dedicated to physique variety of their runway casting – those that most frequently put on naked attire are usually skinny.
Gaia believes that the prevalence of skinny ladies in such attire just isn’t solely resulting from GLP-1s, however the expense of making and advertising plus measurement clothes by means of becoming and ecommerce imagery. (Gaia presents as much as a measurement 18/20.) “It’s very complicated, and it’s not just Ozempic that is playing a role,” he stated. “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 costume right here to remain? Perhaps that is determined by the way you interpret the yr’s most naked costume of all: the scrap of nude nylon worn by Bianca Censori at February’s Grammys. You needed to squint to the see the traces of the costume itself, and practically each outlet ran footage of her at the occasion blurred.
“The relative nakedness of the female body can either be perceived, and/or intended as liberating, or perceived as objectifying,” stated 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 desperate to see feminine nudity whereas purporting to revile it? Or was she so in cost? The naked fact could also be each.