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The naked-dress trend is back, people, and it's more naked than ever. While this look doesn't ever seem to fade away, it's definitely packing quite the punch for 2022. We've seen various iterations of the trend over the years, but right now, it seems to fit in one of two different camps: a skin-colour body-con dress or a barely-there dress that's transparent or sheer or has a strategically placed piece of material (or even a combination of all three).
Cher wearing a dress by designer Bob Mackie at the Met Gala in 1974
The naked dress has a long history, of course. Those who are big Cher fans (and who isn't?) will recall the star's dedication to creations by designer Bob Mackie, who regularly designed risqué items for the singer. Before that, however, there was Marilyn Monroe's infamous sheer dress she wore in 1962 to sing happy birthday to President John F. Kennedy. Of course, this dress was recently (and somewhat infamously) worn by Kim Kardashian to the Met Gala 2022.
Marilyn Monroe singing happy birthday to President John F. Kennedy wearing a sheer dress
The coolest takes on it—and perhaps my personal favourites—include Jane Birkin in 1969 and Kate Moss in 1993 both wearing sheer dresses with black knickers. It's the more understated way of doing the nude-dress trend.
But in recent years, this trend has gone full glamour. Rihanna's 2014 CFDA look and Beyoncé's Met Gala 2015 dress by Givenchy made headlines for being pretty naked. In 2019, Kim Kardashian's wet-look Mugler creation definitely ticked off the naked-dress trend box thanks to its body-con aesthetic and colour.
Jane Birkin's naked dress she wore to the premiere of Slogan in 1969
Over the past couple of weeks, I've spotted loads of naked dresses on the red carpet, which proves that this trend is officially back. First, Zendaya wore a leather Balmain dress at the Venice Film Festival, then Megan Fox wore a Mugler frock (another wet-look gown from the designer) to the VMAs. Then on Monday, we were treated to a variety of barely-there dresses at the Met Gala—the first to take place since the pandemic. However, the ones leading the pack on the naked-dress trend here were Kendall Jenner's pretty diamanté Givenchy gown and Zoe Kravitz's mesh Saint Laurent dress.
Kate Moss wearing a sheer dress at the Look of the Year Contest in 1993
Normally, I'd give you some tips on how to do the trend IRL, but this is quite the tricky look to pull off down your local. Instead, if this is something you're drawn to, perhaps it's worth taking inspiration from the current looks and toning it down so you won't look so conspicuous when drinking a glass of rosé. Keep scrolling to see the current naked-dress looks and then shop my edit of naked dresses.
Style Notes: One of the coolest looks from the Met Gala 2021, Zoe Kravitz's Saint Laurent mesh frock is barely there, but she still manages to look super sophisticated.
Style Notes: While Kendall Jenner's frock is definitely in the naked category, it's actually based off Audrey Hepburn's look in My Fair Lady .
Style Notes: This is perhaps the ultimate naked dress, to be honest. Sheer, skin coloured, and leaves very little to the imagination, Megan Fox knows how to embrace this trend to the max.
Style Notes: A more subtle take on the trend, this is still very much a naked dress. The skin-tone frock from Balmain has been created in leather, giving it a wet look for Zendaya's red carpet moment.
Style Notes: Don't forget about Rihanna's CFDA moment in 2014.
Style Notes: Beyoncé's take on the naked-dress trend meant going for a sheer gown with strategically placed flowers on her Givenchy gown.
Before Kim Kardashian wore Marilyn Monroe's sheer dress, she turned heads in this creation by Mugler.
Influencer royalty Camille wears a sheer lace to the latter part of her wedding.
Lizzo combines sheer fabric with beautiful crystals to create a naked dress worthy of any party setting.
Alyssa takes a Gucci mini dress and pairs it with opaque tights and knee boots for a cool new spin.
Sheer panelling will help you achieve the naked dress aesthetic, only with slightly more coverage.
Hailey Bieber showcases a sparkly 16Arlington naked dress for the launch of her skincare label, Rhode.
This vintage printed Jean Paul Gaultier maxi is a different stance on the naked-dress trend.
Naked dresses arguably look their chicest with high necklines and long hemlines.
Next up, these are the biggest autumn/winter 2022 fashion trends to know.

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Now you see it, now you don’t? After ruling the red carpet for more than a decade, the naked dress may be on its last legs. The barely there dresses were barely there at the recent MTV Video Music Awards. Instead, the carpet — black, not red — was obscured by trains, capes, feathers, flounces and other fruits of fashion’s post-pandemic maximalist turn. Even one of the show’s skimpiest looks, Taylor Swift’s backless Oscar de la Renta, somehow managed to be minimalist and maximalist at the same time, substituting bedazzled chains for fabric. There might have been plenty of skin on display, but it wasn’t highlighted by transparent or flesh-colored fabrics.
A naked dress is a bit like Justice Potter Stewart’s aphorism about pornography: You know it when you see it — or don’t see it. “Naked dress” may be an oxymoron, but it’s an apt description for garments that reveal as much as they conceal, because they’re sheer, skin-toned, skintight or all of the above. Though they’ve often been dismissed as attention-seeking (and attention-getting) “thirst traps,” these naked dresses have often served as powerful instruments of female sexual agency across fashion history .
In more buttoned-up times, the phrase signified strapless dresses, not sheer ones. When the couturier Mainbocher introduced the gravity-defying gowns in 1934, awestruck journalists marveled that they seemed “to stay in place only by a miracle,” as New York World-Telegram fashion editor Gertrude Bailey noted.
A similar sartorial sleight-of-hand produced “illusion gowns,” closely resembling the naked dress as we know it. First worn by burlesque artists and showgirls, they migrated to movie studios, adorning early silver screen sirens like Theda Bara, Mae West and Marlene Dietrich. The style went mainstream when Marilyn Monroe was sewn into an illusion gown made by Hollywood costumer Jean Louis to sing “Happy Birthday” to President John F. Kennedy at a 1962 Democratic Party fundraiser at Madison Square Garden. The rhinestone-studded silk soufflé, dyed to match Monroe’s skin tone, disappeared under the stage lights; to the audience, it looked like she was clad in nothing but rhinestones.
Near-sheer dresses graced runways and red carpets on and off throughout the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s. But they weren’t called “naked dresses” until 1998, when an early episode of “Sex in the City” recoined the term. Carrie Bradshaw wore what her prim friend Charlotte disapprovingly called a “naked dress” on a date with Mr. Big. Carrie’s dress wasn’t a showgirl-style evening gown, however, or even what we could call a “naked dress” today. Instead, it was a backless slip dress — short but not transparent. More importantly, the matte putty color didn’t match the glowing rose-gold of actress Sarah Jessica Parker’s skin, so there was no illusion of nudity.
Nevertheless, “naked dress” resonated with the stripped-down minimalism of 1990s fashion, which Museum at FIT curator Colleen Hill has called a reaction to the more-is-more aesthetic of the 1980s and the resulting recession. Like Botticelli’s Venus, the naked dress emerged out of the era’s neutral shades and sleek, unembellished silhouettes that exposed fresh areas of the female anatomy: midriffs, hipbones, bum cleavage . The term “side-boob” was coined in 1994 (by actor Mike Myers, per the Oxford English Dictionary) to describe an entirely new erogenous zone showcased by the revealing styles; Liz Hurley stepped out in Versace’s black safety-pin gown the same year.
By the early 2000s, side-boob was the new cleavage, the subject of think pieces in Salon and the New York Times . “Part of its appeal is that it hints at revealing something … while also keeping its wearer covered up,” Salon explained. Similarly, naked dresses offered the illusion of nudity rather than the reality; instead of baring any single body part, they forced the eye to rove, taking in the whole silhouette.
The naked dress trend was directly responsible for one of the major innovations to come out of the dot-com boom: Google Images. When Jennifer Lopez attended the 2000 Grammy Awards in a plunging, sheer silk Versace gown held together by nothing more than a citrine brooch and double-sided tape, she broke the internet. “At the time, it was the most popular search query we had ever seen,” former Google CEO Eric Schmidt remembered . “But we had no surefire way of getting users exactly what they wanted: JLo wearing that dress.”
Search results produced simple pages of text with links; Google realized it needed an image search tool, and developed one, introduced in 2001. The dress that launched Google Images raised the bar for red-carpet style and — more than a decade before Instagram — prefigured the role of social media in setting fashion trends (and sharing NSFW photos).
It’s a look guaranteed to make people look twice, so it’s no wonder that the naked dress became a red-carpet mainstay in the digital age. With so many fashion designers clamoring for free publicity — and so many photographers and journalists eager to give it to them — celebrities went to ever-greater lengths to get noticed. Thanks to the backdrop of the step-and-repeat — a temporary wall plastered with sponsor logos — as well as instantaneous uploading to social media, the red carpet became a digital billboard. With its audacity and trompe l’oeil visual appeal, the naked dress was the perfect clickbait. Walking a fine line between exposure and overexposure, it required only one accessory: confidence.
Naked dresses are fashion statements in more ways than one. At the 2002 Academy Awards, Halle Berry’s burgundy Elie Saab gown with a sweeping satin skirt and a sheer bodice decorated with strategically placed bands of floral embroidery raised eyebrows. Though Berry had one of the most famous bodies in Hollywood, the bombshell look was at odds with the dramatic role for which she was nominated, in the feel-bad film “Monster’s Ball.” But later that night, when Berry became the first (and, to date, only) Black woman to win the Best Actress Oscar, it suddenly seemed fitting that she’d proudly shown her skin on a red carpet that had not always been welcoming to women of color.
The move epitomized how naked dresses empower women who might be overlooked due to stereotypes or bigotry. As a fashion and makeup entrepreneur, Barbados-born singer/actress Rihanna has been outspoken about offering options for a wide range of sizes and skin tones, so it’s fitting that she has repeatedly demonstrated that she’s comfortable in her own skin (and not much else) on the red carpet. Canadian model Winnie Harlow has the skin condition vitiligo, which causes uneven, patchy pigmentation. When she wears a naked dress, she’s baring more than her figure; she’s baring her unique skin, knowing it will make some people uncomfortable. Video Music Awards honoree and body positivity icon Lizzo celebrated her plus-size figure by wearing a purple naked dress to rapper Cardi B.’s most recent birthday party. These women of color use fashion — what it conceals and reveals — to challenge expectations about beauty, race and the female body, presenting themselves as works of art.
Given the storied history of naked dresses, it is a shame that their days may well be numbered. Along with covid, blame Kim Kardashian’s controversial choice to attend May’s Met Gala wearing Marilyn Monroe’s iconic Jean Louis gown. The stunt wasn’t just a slap in the face to the historic costume preservation the event supports, but a futile attempt to replicate the original “illusion” of nudity the gown created. Despite a last-minute crash diet, the gown didn’t fit Kardashian’s figure or match her complexion. It didn’t look “naked”; indeed, it was hardly even recognizable as the same dress, serving up Carrie Bradshaw’s bland beige slip rather than “Happy Birthday, Mr. President.” In the glare of the spotlight, the archetypal naked dress became the emperor’s new clothes.

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Numerous barely-there gowns at the Met Gala suggest that the celebrity trend for revealing fashion has returned
After experiencing so many months of lockdowns and social restrictions, we have finally entered a period of relative normality and freedom, which has many of us – and the celebrities now gracing the red carpet once again – dressing up more than we ever have before. Alongside this, there is a clear trend emerging on the red carpet, one which we have not seen for a while and which certainly nods to this idea of freedom and celebration, and that is so-called naked dressing.
Last night saw the return of the Met Gala , the biggest night on the fashion calendar, while we have also been lucky enough to witness the full revival of the Cannes and Venice Film Festivals this summer, as well as numerous award shows. At these events, models and actresses are adopting the idea of naked dressing in a big way, opting for completely sheer, revealing gowns.
Take Kendall Jenner and Zoë Kravitz, who last night showed off their figures in barely-there dresses. Jenner wore a custom Givenchy couture design, which was inspired by Audrey Hepburn's gown in My Fair Lady , but, unlike Hepburn's, it was completely see-through, revealing just her nude thong underneath. Kravitz too revealed her tiny underwear, which was visible underneath her unlined, beaded Saint Laurent dress.
These two followed in the footsteps of actress Megan Fox, who just one night previously wore a sheer Mugler gown to the MTV VMAs , while Cynthia Erivo, Zendaya and Imaan Hammam have all dabbled in a bit of naked dressing this summer.
This celebrity penchant for wearing barely anything is of course nothing new. Rihanna kickstarted the trend in 2014 when she wore a completely bedazzled, completely see-through Adam Selman dress to the CFDA Awards. After that, supermodels everywhere adopted the barely-there dress , many referencing Cher's iconic 1974 Met Gala look (a completely sheer design by Bob Mackie) as inspiration for the modern craze.
However, as with so many red-carpet trends, it fell out of favour as quickly as it blew up. But, it appears to be back with a vengeance – and, it's not hard to see why.
As the world emerges from so many months of anxiety spent inside, there is a real feeling of celebration dressing in the air. Many believe that we are experiencing the
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