Why Is Everyone Going Naked in Public Now and Calling It “Naked Dressing”?
The 2026 awards season has been the season of the naked dress.
Jennifer Lawrence wore a sheer Givenchy embroidered with flowers at the Golden Globes. Jenna Ortega showed everything sideways in Dilara Findikoglu cutouts. Nicole Kidman wore Schiaparelli like a dare. Sydney Sweeney has been in crystal-covered mesh at almost every event she has shown up to, often braless, with her nipples visible through the fabric.
Chappell Roan and Heidi Klum took it furthest at the Grammys, with dresses that looked completely naked but actually covered everything. Roan’s gown was a recreation of a Thierry Mugler 1998 Spring/Summer Couture piece. Her makeup team, led by Sasha Glasser, attached the dress to silicone prosthetic nipple piercings glued to her chest with Telesis medical adhesive. The silver rings hooked through the prosthetics carried the actual weight of the dress. The prosthetics had no actual nipples, which let the photos clear Instagram and Facebook’s nudity filters.
Klum’s dress was a hardened leather cast molded from a 3D scan of her own body, lacquered in a glossy skin tone. She said it was so rigid she could barely walk in it. It was designed by Marina Hoermanseder, the Austrian-German designer known for sculptural, fetish-inspired silhouettes.
The trend has spread well past the red carpet. Bella Hadid, Kendall Jenner, Hailey Bieber, Kylie Jenner, Emily Ratajkowski, and Bianca Censori have all been photographed in sheer mesh and barely-there slips on regular days. A handful of it-girl labels are powering it: Are You Am I out of Los Angeles, Mirror Palais in New York, Nensi Dojaka in London, Rat & Boa, and a wave of more accessible Revolve labels (Lovers and Friends, Jaded London, AFRM). The Instagram users imitating the look buy from the same brands.
The exposed thong has become its own styling signature inside the trend. Hailey Bieber wore a vintage Gucci naked dress over a visible thong at the 2025 GQ Men of the Year party. Teyana Taylor wore a sheer Tom Ford “thong dress” at the Time100 Next event. Chappell Roan turned around on the Paris Fashion Week carpet in a Vivienne Westwood gown with a backless skirt, sheer tights, and a black thong underneath, all visible. Dakota Johnson did the look twice in September 2025: a sheer black floral Gucci gown with a visible Fleur du Mal balconette bra and matching thong at the Kering Caring for Women dinner during NYFW, then a sheer cobalt blue Gucci dress with no bra at the Zurich Film Festival two weeks later. The underwear is part of the outfit.
The naked dress is older than people think. Mae West wore a lace frock in her 1936 film Go West, Young Man that looks almost identical to the vintage Jean-Louis Scherrer gown Jennifer Lopez wore at the Golden Globes this year. Marilyn Monroe sang Happy Birthday to JFK in 1962 in a nude-toned, curve-hugging Jean Louis creation. Cher and Bob Mackie spent the 1970s building see-through gowns. Jennifer Lopez’s green Versace at the 2000 Grammys was searched so often it inspired the creation of Google Image Search. The term “naked dress” itself was coined on Sex and the City in 1998.
April Clemmer, a Los Angeles stylist and fashion historian, traces the look back further. The French Merveilleuses of the 1790s wore sheer muslin chemises and sometimes wet the fabric to make it translucent. Some died of pneumonia from the exposure. In the 17th century, aristocratic women rouged their nipples to make them visible through low-cut bodices. The free-the-nipple movement of the 2010s, with Florence Pugh in pink Valentino tulle, Rihanna in crystal mesh, and Doja Cat in a cobweb corset, normalized the modern braless sheer look. Roan and Klum did the inverse: maximum artifice, total coverage, dressed as nakedness.
The reason it is everywhere now is more specific than people think. Robert Ossant, a fashion historian, told Newsweek that the 1990s naked dress (Julien Macdonald, Tom Ford at Gucci, Versace) existed for magazine editors who wanted pictures of nearly-nude women on covers. The 2026 version exists for the scroll, and for a different reason.
In an era when anyone with a phone can deepfake or Photoshop a celebrity’s body, dressing as a deliberate, authored, idealized version of yourself is the only way to control how your body is seen before someone else fakes it. The 2026 wave of non-consensual AI “nudification” tools, including the Grok AI deepfake controversies, brought the urgency forward. Roan, Klum, Lawrence, Ortega, Kidman, Sweeney, and Johnson are all doing the same thing. Putting their own controlled, exaggerated, fully-engineered version of the naked body out first, on their terms. The Instagram users imitating it are doing the same thing on a smaller scale, with sheer slip dresses and strategic mesh.
Ossant put it this way: “I think an element of it is to do with women reclaiming the narrative around their bodies. With AI and Photoshop allowing anyone to do anything, stepping out in a naked dress effectively takes the wind out of the sails and allows them to own the way people see their bodies.”
In 2026, the nakedest looks are the most armored.
Photo Credits: Dakota Johnson and Sydney Sweeney, “Madame Web” world premiere, Westwood, Los Angeles. Photo: Backgrid. Hailey Bieber, 2025 GQ Men of the Year party, Chateau Marmont, Los Angeles. Photo: Backgrid.