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 Hervé Léger to mimic the white Legér bandage dress worn by her mother, Cindy Crawford, to the Oscars in 1993 with Richard Gere. In January, the influencer Olivia Boblet posted a TikTok showing herself in a Hervé Léger bandage dresss, 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 U.S. awards, doubling down on the style in early June with a vintage Léger number.
“Criminally hot,” Kim Russell, a.k.a. the Kimbino, wrote when she reposted a picture of Ms. Bieber on Instagram in the vintage look.
Ms. Bieber responded, “Herve bandage dresses are back I fear.”
Part of this re-emergence is down to the House of CB, a British brand that made its name by introducing the bandage dress to a new generation back in 2010, and reintroduced it as part of its birthday celebrations last month. Part of it has to do with Hervé Léger itself, the brand that popularized the look, which 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 Léger 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 Léger 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, erm, 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 Mr. Léger, the bandage dress was actually invented by Azzedine Alaïa, 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 armor of Thierry Mugler, the Alaïa dress, which was inspired by Egyptian mummies, offered a different kind of physical assertion, one that celebrated the female figure while also protecting it.
The French philosopher Michel Tournier wrote that bandage dresses allowed women “to be held — as tightly as possible — while remaining free.” They were mere wisps compared with the padded, skyscraper jackets that had dominated women’s wardrobes.
It’s “a strange contradiction,” in the words of Olivier Saillard, the fashion historian and curator of the Fondation Azzedine Alaïa.
It was such a pivot that, in 1985, not long after the first bandage dresses were shown, Mr. Alaïa 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.
Mr. Léger introduced his version of the dress in the early 1990s. While the Alaïa bandage dresses, which were knit from a stretchy viscose, were relatively soft — they molded the body and wrapped it, rather than constricting it — the Léger version “really did feel like an Ace bandage,” Ms. Crawford said. For all that it celebrated the female form, the dress also molded and constrained it — sometimes, Ms. Crawford acknowledged, pretty painfully.
Nevertheless, she said, “the models all gravitated to it.” Linda Evangelista, Iman, Naomi Campbell — they all wore bandage dresses. “It was a chic way to show your body, but not trashy,” Ms. 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.
Little wonder that, almost 20 years later, when celebrity culture replaced model culture, the bandage dress was “rediscovered.” Kim Kardashian, Victoria Beckham (in her Posh Spice incarnation), Rihanna, Beyoncé and Britney Spears wore bandage dresses on the red carpet.
“It was the go-to dress,” Mr. Roach said.
Even Kate Winslet, famous now for her refusal to play Hollywood’s glamour game, wore a bandage dress to the premiere of her 2008 film “The Reader,” in perhaps the ultimate expression of the conformist pressure that the style once exerted. Literally and figuratively.
It may be worth noting that this time around, despite all the social media enthusiasm and the fact that, according to Katy Lubin, a spokeswoman 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 percent in the last three months,” Ms. 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.”
Vanessa Friedman has been the fashion director and chief fashion critic for The Times since 2014.
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