Sheer appeal: A-listers show us how to nail nearly naked looks with class

Fashion’s current veer towards sheer has yet again stoked an inordinate – and familiar – level of ire.

Recent years have seen the phenomenon of the “naked dress” on the red carpet, worn by a roll-call of chic provocateurs – from Rihanna, patron saint of see-through dresses, to Kendall Jenner, Florence Pugh and Bella Hadid. Then there has been season upon season of diaphanous, barely there runway collections, from Nensi Dojaka to Saint Laurent, Prada and, of course, her naughty little sister, Miu Miu.

There’s a certain hand wringing that sheer dresses can bring on – notably, Pugh clapped back at a chorus of objections to the sheer candyfloss pink Valentino gown she wore to the maison’s July 2022 couture show (“Why are you so scared of breasts?” she wrote on Instagram).

Such outrage is nothing new: back in the 18th century the writer Louis-Sébastien Mercier described the subject of Portrait of a Young Woman in White, painter unknown, as dressed “à la sauvage”, noting that the dress she wore “did not leave the beholder to divine but perceive every secret charm”.

Today, you might spot the painting in a bookstore, gracing the cover of the 2018 cult novel My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh.

As Katie Somerville, senior curator of fashion textiles at the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne, points out, women were wearing sheer dresses long before J. Lo prompted the invention of Google Image Search with her sheer jungle-print Versace dress at the 2000 Grammys.

“There are always precedents across fashionable history. One that is fun to go back to is that tipping point post French Revolution, just before the start of the 19th century,” Somerville says. “You had a rejection of that very exaggerated 18th century silhouette with panniers and corsets [in favour of] an uncorseted, seemingly ‘natural’ silhouette. What we subsequently come to know as the empire line, but more importantly, these dresses were very sheer, fine-woven muslin fabrics. This was obviously the height of fashion, but equally, ripe for speculation and caricature in print, given how sheer these things were.”

It’s particularly interesting, she adds, that this moment in time became a source of inspiration for designers who would remix the see-through look. Exhibit A: John Galliano’s bewitching couture show for Margiela in January with dresses so sheer, they were paired with merkins (pubic wigs).

“It’s a period or a moment that has subsequently captured the imagination of designers,” she notes, adding that Galliano was also an obvious example of this early in his career, in the 80s. “One collection in particular, Fallen Angels, for spring/summer 86,” Somerville elaborates. “You’ll see he is replicating these muslin gowns and the supposed practice at the time of dampening them to make them cling to the body.”