Pure fashion: The A-listers recreating nearly naked looks with class – from Kim Kardashian and Kendall Jenner to Jennifer Lopez and Rihanna

The current shift in fashion towards sheer fabrics has once again sparked an outrageous – and familiar – level of anger.

In recent years, we’ve seen the phenomenon of the “naked dress” take to the red carpet, worn by a whole host of chic provocateurs – from Rihanna, patron saint of sheer dresses, to Kendall Jenner, Florence Pugh and Bella Hadid. And then there are the seasons of sheer, barely there catwalk collections, from Nensi Dojaka to Saint Laurent, Prada and of course her naughty little sister, Miu Miu.

There’s a certain level of anxiety that sheer dresses can provoke. Pugh, notably, responded to a chorus of objections to the sheer, cotton-candy pink Valentino gown she wore to the fashion house’s couture show in July 2022 (“Why are you so afraid of boobs?” she wrote on Instagram).

Such outrage is not new: as early as the 18th century, the writer Louis-Sébastien Mercier described the subject Portrait of a young woman in whitepainter unknown, dressed “à la sauvage”, noting that the dress she wore “did not leave the viewer guessing, but allowed every secret charm to be perceived”.

Today you might see the painting in a bookstore, on 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, notes, women were wearing sheer dresses long before J. Lo kicked off the invention of Google Image Search with her sheer jungle-print Versace dress at the 2000 Grammys.

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

What’s particularly interesting, she adds, is that this moment in time became a source of inspiration for designers who would remix the sheer look. Exhibit A: John Galliano’s bedazzled couture show for Margiela in January, which featured dresses so sheer they were paired with merkins.

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