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Barely There: How the Naked Dress Became a Referendum on Acceptable Bodies When fashion claims to celebrate all bodies but only photographs one
by Michael Lamonaca, 2 January 2025
Fashion designers say the naked dress celebrates the female body in all its forms, that sheer fabric and strategic beading represent a woman’s freedom to appear exactly as she chooses. Marcelo Gaia, who pioneered the contemporary naked dress in 2019, says “a woman’s body is just so beautiful—if you want to make something beautiful, you really don’t have to do that much.” But the bodies deemed beautiful enough to wear naked dresses in 2025 tell a narrower story. They’re thin—not just thin, but identically thin in the way that suggests pharmaceutical intervention rather than genetic variation. The naked dress emerged during the body positivity movement three years ago, when designers claimed to celebrate diverse forms. It peaked in 2025 when Ozempic and its competitors had reshaped celebrity bodies into a single silhouette, when the ultimate fashion statement became revealing a body that first had to be disciplined into acceptability. The naked dress isn’t about celebrating bodies. It’s about celebrating the right body, and punishing deviation through exclusion dressed up as aesthetic choice.
The mechanics of the naked dress operate through a simple formula: sheer fabric plus minimal coverage equals maximum visibility. In 2025, the trend reached saturation across red carpets. Margot Robbie appeared in slim strands of beads and rhinestones. Julia Fox wore little more than strategic placement of brunette curls in a Botticelli-inspired design by Dilara Findikoglu. Sienna Miller revealed her pregnancy through empire-waisted sheer white mesh. Halle Berry wore panels of alternating black bugle beads and stretch mesh that fanned into a lengthy train, designed by LaQuan Smith. Ciara wore swags of crystals between hourglass panels of black matte silk, also by Smith. Sydney Sweeney sparked social media controversy in Christian Cowan’s crystal T-shirt dress, appearing braless at a Variety party where some critics called her appearance vulgar while others celebrated it as empowering.
The designers behind these garments speak consistently about liberation and female agency. LaQuan Smith wrote in an email that “the naked dress has never been about exposure for me, it’s about liberation. It’s about a woman choosing to show up exactly as she wants, in full control of her presence.” Christian Cowan says he loved that Sweeney’s dress “was a bit controversial, and sparked conversations. I think anything worthwhile upsets some people.” Gaia considers his designs a celebration of femininity, inspired by models’ reactions during early fittings when they saw themselves in dresses made of single layers of fabric without lining. The language is consistent: choice, control, confidence, celebration.
But the bodies wearing these celebrated garments reveal a different pattern. The women who appeared in 2025’s most photographed naked dresses—Robbie, Fox, Miller, Berry, Ciara, Sweeney—share a body type that would have been recognizable in any decade but has become particularly uniform in the past three years. They are thin in a specific way: not the thin of marathon runners or ballet dancers, whose muscles create distinct body shapes, but the thin of weight loss that preserves facial fullness while eliminating body mass. This is the silhouette that emerged alongside the widespread adoption of GLP-1 medications like Ozempic, Wegovy, and Mounjaro among celebrities and wealthy individuals seeking rapid weight loss.
The timing of the naked dress’s surge cannot be separated from the pharmaceutical reshaping of celebrity bodies. GLP-1 medications became widely available for weight loss in 2021-2022, creating a population of newly thin celebrities by 2023-2024 who needed clothing that demonstrated their transformed bodies. The naked dress provided the perfect vehicle—what better way to display weight loss than through garments designed to reveal as much skin as possible? The trend that designers claim emerged from body positivity actually peaked after body positivity’s practical collapse, when pharmaceutical intervention replaced acceptance as the dominant response to body dissatisfaction.
Marcelo Gaia launched Mirror Palais in 2019, at the height of the body positivity movement when brands were expanding size ranges and featuring diverse body types in campaigns and runway shows. The naked dress in that context operated differently—it could plausibly claim to celebrate bodies because the culture was actually celebrating different body types. But by 2025, the context had shifted. Body positivity as a commercial and cultural force had weakened significantly. Major fashion brands quietly reduced their size ranges. Runway casting reverted to predominantly thin models. The celebrities most visible in media and on red carpets became uniformly thin in ways that suggested medical intervention rather than natural variation.
The designers themselves acknowledge the problem while attributing it to factors beyond their control. Gaia notes that while he offers sizes up to 18/20, the expense of creating and marketing plus-size clothing through fitting samples and e-commerce imagery creates barriers. “It’s very complicated, and it’s not just Ozempic that is playing a role,” he says. “One hundred percent, white supremacy, thinness, its adjacencies—like that is playing a role. But it really also comes down to money.” Christian Cowan emphasizes that “for the most part, I don’t think women are dressing for the male gaze,” suggesting that women’s own preferences drive their clothing choices regardless of who’s watching.
The question is whether choice can be separated from the context that shapes which choices feel available. When a designer says the naked dress represents a woman’s freedom to appear exactly as she wants, that statement assumes the woman’s body already conforms to standards that make a naked dress socially acceptable. A size 18 woman could theoretically wear a naked dress—some designers offer the sizing—but would she receive the same celebration as Margot Robbie or Halle Berry? The media coverage, social media engagement, and designer promotion overwhelmingly feature thin bodies in naked dresses. When larger bodies appear in revealing clothing, the response tends toward mockery, concern-trolling about health, or pointed silence rather than celebration of confidence and liberation.
This creates a hierarchy where the naked dress functions as reward for body conformity rather than celebration of body diversity. The economic dimension of this hierarchy is rarely discussed but fundamentally shapes who can participate. GLP-1 medications cost between $900 and $1,350 per month without insurance coverage. Ozempic, Wegovy, and Mounjaro are typically not covered by insurance for weight loss purposes, making the annual cost $10,800 to $16,200. A year of treatment to achieve the body type celebrated in naked dresses costs more than many Americans earn in months. The price point creates a class barrier disguised as aesthetic preference: the bodies deemed worthy of celebration are bodies that required significant financial resources to create.
The mechanism is circular and compounds across multiple dimensions. Wealthy celebrities can afford GLP-1 medications and personal trainers and nutritionists. They achieve uniform thinness. Designers create naked dresses that display this thinness. Media photographs and celebrates these wealthy, thin celebrities. The public sees these images and internalizes that thinness is required for fashion celebration. Those who can afford GLP-1 medications pursue them. Those who cannot afford them internalize that their bodies exclude them from certain forms of cultural participation. The naked dress becomes not just a fashion trend but a class marker—visible evidence of access to resources required to transform one’s body into currently acceptable form.
The historical precedent for body-revealing fashion emerging alongside body standardization is well-documented. Dr. Valerie Steele, director and chief curator of The Museum at FIT, points to the 1920s and 1930s when designers like Madeleine Vionnet and Coco Chanel created bias-cut gowns that clung to the figure with shorter hemlines showing legs. These body-skimming dresses required specific body types to appear as intended—the newly slim, “physically disciplined” bodies that became fashionable as women adopted more restrictive eating and exercise regimens. Steele notes that in the background of these fashion trends, fascism was beginning its ascent across Europe, and “the oppression of liberal values and a focus on the newly slim, physically disciplined body seemed to play off each other.”
The parallel to 2025 is uncomfortable but clear. As bodies become more uniform through pharmaceutical intervention and renewed cultural emphasis on thinness, the fashion trend that emerges celebrates revealing those uniform bodies. The naked dress operates as both documentation of this transformation and incentive for its continuation. It says: this is what bodies should look like now, and if yours looks this way too, you can participate in this celebration of liberation and confidence.
The language of empowerment obscures the mechanism of exclusion. When Christian Cowan says “I love the questioning of, why is this taboo? A part of a woman’s body shouldn’t be taboo. It should be completely her decision of what she does with that,” he’s technically correct about bodily autonomy. But the autonomy in question is autonomy for women whose bodies already meet industry standards. Women with different body types who attempt to exercise the same autonomy by wearing revealing clothing face different responses—not celebration of their confidence, but criticism of their choices, concern about their health, or suggestions that certain styles “aren’t flattering” for their body type.
The naked dress thus reveals more about cultural standards than individual freedom. Fashion scholar Valerie Steele observes that “the relative nakedness of the female body can either be perceived, and/or intended as liberating, or perceived as objectifying.” The same garment can have multiple meanings depending on who wears it, who designed it, and who’s viewing it. But those meanings are constrained by the context in which they appear. In a culture that has recently experienced the collapse of body diversity advocacy and the rise of pharmaceutical body modification, a fashion trend celebrating body revelation inevitably becomes a referendum on which bodies are acceptable to reveal.
The designers who create naked dresses may genuinely intend them as celebrations of femininity and female agency. But intention doesn’t determine outcome. LaQuan Smith can design his sheer panels and crystal swags with liberation in mind, but when the women photographed wearing those designs are uniformly thin in ways that suggest medical intervention, the liberation becomes conditional. It’s liberation for those who first conform to narrow standards. The confidence celebrated is confidence that comes after achieving the right body type, not confidence in whatever body one already has.
Writer and editor Tish Weinstock, who wore a sheer vintage John Galliano dress to her wedding, describes feeling like “an apparition” rather than naked in such garments. She says she’s wearing “beautiful, historical relics from the 1930s, eroded over time, or iconic Galliano or Dolce gowns from the 90s. For me, it allows me to become a character.” This perspective highlights how the naked dress operates as costume, as transformation into a particular kind of feminine ideal rather than revelation of one’s actual self. The dress doesn’t celebrate the body you have—it transforms you into a character who has the body the dress requires.
The most revealing naked dress of 2025 may have been the one that sparked the most controversy precisely because it made the mechanism too visible. Bianca Censori appeared at February’s Grammys in what CNN described as “a scrap of nude nylon”—so minimal that media outlets had to blur their photographs of her. Steele asks whether Censori was “merely a sexual prop for a public eager to see female nudity while purporting to revile it? Or was she so in charge?” The question is unanswerable because it depends on which interpretation you apply, but the controversy reveals the contradiction embedded in the naked dress as a cultural phenomenon.
If naked dresses represent liberation and female agency, why did Censori’s version—the most naked of all—provoke such discomfort? Why did outlets blur images they would have published unblurred if more strategic crystal placement had created the illusion of coverage? The naked dress only functions as empowerment when it maintains enough structure, enough design, enough fashion credibility to frame nudity as artistic choice rather than exposure. When the balance tips too far toward actual nakedness, the cultural response shifts from celebration to scandal. This suggests that what’s being celebrated isn’t women’s freedom to control their own presentation but designers’ skill in packaging that presentation in ways that feel transgressive without actually violating norms.
The cost of creating naked dresses that work within these constraints is not just financial but conceptual. The designer must create the illusion of nudity while maintaining enough coverage to avoid scandal. The wearer must have a body that looks “right” revealed—thin enough to meet beauty standards, but not so thin as to appear unhealthy; curves in approved locations but not others; skin unmarked by visible signs of aging, cellulite, or stretch marks. The viewer must interpret the display as empowered choice rather than desperate attention-seeking or objectification. When all these conditions align, the naked dress succeeds as fashion moment. When any element fails, the response becomes mockery or concern rather than celebration.
The question facing anyone analyzing the naked dress trend is what it reveals about the relationship between fashion, bodies, and power in 2025. The trend emerged when designers needed ways to display the newly uniform thinness created by GLP-1 adoption. It peaked when body positivity had weakened as a cultural force but its language of empowerment and choice remained available for repurposing. It succeeded by allowing designers to claim they were celebrating female bodies while actually celebrating a specific body type that required pharmaceutical or extreme behavioral intervention to achieve. And it operated through exclusion—not the explicit exclusion of refusing to make dresses in larger sizes, but the softer exclusion of making those dresses available while ensuring that celebration, media coverage, and cultural validation flowed only to thin bodies wearing them.
The naked dress doesn’t celebrate bodies. It celebrates the work required to transform a body into something culturally acceptable to celebrate. When Marcelo Gaia says “a woman’s body is just so beautiful” and “you really don’t have to do that much” to make something beautiful, he’s describing a fantasy version of the naked dress where any body could wear it and receive the same response. But the actual practice of the naked dress in 2025 reveals that you have to do quite a lot—lose weight through medication or extreme discipline, maintain that weight, present a body that conforms to narrow standards of acceptable thinness, and only then can you access the celebration that designers describe as universal.
The liberation claimed for the naked dress is real for a narrow population—women whose bodies already conform to industry standards and who can therefore reveal those bodies without facing criticism. For everyone else, the naked dress operates as reminder of exclusion, a demonstration that certain forms of confidence and self-expression are reserved for those who have first done the work of body transformation. When fashion calls this liberation while practicing it as gate-keeping, the language of empowerment becomes another mechanism of control, and the most revealing thing about the naked dress isn’t what it shows but what it requires before it will show it.
Tags: Fashion, Body Image, GLP-1, Ozempic, Body Positivity, Beauty Standards, Celebrity Culture, Naked Dress