This is Checking Out, a column about how we shop, what we buy, and how it all makes us feel. Email tips and ideas to [email protected].
The first time I looked at the photo, I thought my eyes were playing tricks on me. It was an image on Instagram, taken at a friend’s wedding, of a mutual acquaintance in a jewel-toned tulle gown. Her bodice was elegantly gathered, her sleeves ruffled. And her skirt? Completely see-through.
A generous pair of panties peeked through, visible to all—the wedding officiant, the parents of the bride, close friends at the event, near strangers on the internet. This was a couple of years ago, when translucent clothing had made its way onto runways and red carpets but wasn’t yet a common look for normies. It was hard for me to believe that a respectable person would consider a glorified bathing-suit cover-up appropriate attire for a fancy, family-friendly event.
That moment seems quaint now. More than two years into the trend that fashion writers call “naked dressing,” I am no longer the scandalized elder with an outdated sense of decorum, rubbernecking at each public display of bikini briefs. And thank goodness for that, because sheer garments are not going anywhere. Magazines and fashion blogs are offering styling tips. People are asking advice columnists what to wear under gauzy dresses and what to do when a family member wears mesh to a milestone event. In April, WSJ Magazine published a photo spread on how to wear see-through clothing in the workplace. (“Yes, Really,” the headline assured us.)
In an era of fast fashion and the lightning-speed trend turnover it enables, clothing that shows one’s undergarments—or lack thereof—has become the rare look that sticks around.
Among celebrities in particular, naked dressing is the new norm. At any A-lister event, you’ll see a sizable number of attendees in outfits that expose their nipples, underwear, or both. The trend spans generations: At the Vanity Fair Oscars party this year, 24-year-old Ice Spice and 49-year-old Charlize Theron both wore sheer gowns with black underwear showing underneath.
In an industry that runs on fastidiously negotiated nudity riders, and in a country in which some states still classify exposed breasts as unlawful indecency, it can still feel jarring to see Hollywood stars showing their nipples at black-tie events. But celebrities have always pushed the boundaries of fashion, stretching norms of social decency in ways that expand our notions of propriety. The bigger and more surprising shift of the past two years has been the entry of see-through garments into the urban mainstream, where the sight of a thong strap or nip slip now reads as a deliberate fashion statement rather than an unfortunate mishap.
This would have been unthinkable when Donald Trump was first elected president. In 2017, New York Times fashion critic Vanessa Friedman declared “the end of the naked look,” naming modesty the defining style of the 2010s. The suits, maxi skirts, and voluminous sleeves of the era marked not just a trend, analysts predicted, but a lasting shift in what women wanted fashion to be.
Fashion critics read this as a reaction to the political climate. With an unabashed sexual predator in the White House, amid the social upheaval of #MeToo, full-coverage clothing became a kind of armor, worn in comfort, indifferent to the male gaze and traditional notions of sex appeal. “As women have found their voice politically, they have begun to express themselves sartorially,” Friedman wrote in 2017, “be it through white pantsuits, so-called pussy hats or the modest fashion movement.”
Now we find ourselves a G-string’s breadth away from a second Trump administration. The progress-implying optimism of the white pantsuit, a nod to the suffragists, seems inadequate to the occasion. The pussy-hat moment served its purpose, but it’s long dead. If women felt their power in solid garments of self-protection in the first Trump era, what does it mean that the second will be greeted by nipples aplenty and the thinnest fabrics known to humanity?
To understand what the see-through-ification of American clothing says about our politics and ourselves, it helps to remember that this is not a simple case of social mores getting more permissive over time, concluding in an inevitable state of widespread nudity. People have been wearing transparent clothing for centuries. In 1913 Oregon, a trendy piece known as an “X-ray skirt” was blamed for breaking up the marriage of a 30-year-old woman determined to wear her diaphanous garments and her 60-year-old millionaire husband, who hated them. Celebrities like Jane Birkin, Kate Moss, and Cher made their sheer dresses iconic in the latter half of the 20th century.
But what we’re seeing now is not the work of a single trendy garment or a few outliers in the 99th percentile of fashion audacity. It’s the convergence of multiple currents in fashion, boosted by broader shifts in our political and interpersonal lives.
As the modesty drive of the late 2010s began to wane, thong bathing suits, which hadn’t been big since the 1990s, returned to dominate the beach and destigmatize the butt cheek. The Y2K aesthetic came back, reloading the era of lacy camisoles, peekaboo bra straps, and “whale-tail” thongs splish-splashing above low-cut jeans. The pandemic played into this too: Once vaccinated, many of us emerged ready to bask in the public gaze and feel like bodies again, after so many months spent interacting as faces on screens. Within months, Americans were back to dancing among thousands of strangers at arena concerts—and within a few years, their nipples were on the jumbotron.
Ever since the advent of third-wave feminism, explanations of the appeal of revealing clothing tend to unspool the same way: Women aren’t dressing to attract men, the argument goes. They’re dressing to satisfy themselves. So it goes with naked dressing. Two years ago, founders of Eckhaus Latta and Collina Strada both told the New York Times that the trend is fully concerned with the pleasure of the wearer, divorced from—and even antagonistic to—the preferences of the viewer.
This strain of fashion reasoning has always struck me as disingenuously simplistic. When we choose something to wear out of the house, we specifically intend for it to be perceived. We like the way it looks, which also means we like the way it looks to other people—who will spend much more time looking at our outfits than we will—and the way it feels to be seen that way. No one picks a mesh turtleneck in a vacuum.
Even beyond the pull to look hot and on trend, there is a lot to love about going sheer. Because they are built for layering, the garments are basically seasonless. A floaty skirt worn on its own in the summer can be tossed over slim trousers in the fall; an organza button-down shirt bought for holiday parties is light enough to be a cover-up on a warm evening in spring. Depending on what’s worn underneath, the exact degree of an item’s skimpiness can be endlessly tweaked. That could make some pieces easy to rewear and likelier to last as styles change over time, though I suspect that the stranger marriages of fabric and form (Jill Biden’s sheer trenchcoat!) will come to look dated once the moment passes. Luckily, as with any trending consumer good these days, see-through clothing comes in every price point and quality tier, from $36 polyester-blend cargo joggers to $419 gauze pants in 100 percent silk.
The heady feeling of risk inherent in baring an unfamiliar swath of skin is another part of the allure. Mesh clothing demands the preparation of finding the right underwear or bra—a mandate surely appreciated by sheer-clothing retailers that also sell undergarments—which makes it into an event. Once you’ve assembled your getup, you step out into a world where you’ll likely draw a few double takes. When you pull off this thing that felt a little scary at first, your conception of what you’re capable of expands a bit. It’s worth the hassle of having to hand-wash the laundry.
Though naked dressing does contravene certain social expectations, on runways and red carpets across the world, see-through clothing that reveals thin, toned, hairless, expensively maintained bodies that conform to popular beauty standards does not exactly send a radical message of body positivity. It is the kind of trend that will be interpreted differently depending on one’s body type, due to the unfair discrepancy that allows certain clothing to be read as sleek and chic on slender frames, yet cheap and debauched on curvier ones. To the extent that you’ve observed see-through shirts in public, you’ve probably seen more on A-cups than D-cups.
But the types of transparent clothing currently being worn by regular people to regular events don’t always hew to traditional ideas of in-your-face sex appeal. Some garments play with trappings of conservative garb: collared shirts, long skirts, structured dresses. Gauzy tops are worn with sturdy, oversized pants; see-through skirts, with bulky blazers.
And on bodies that don’t fit the rigid specifications of the runway, sheer clothing that flaunts more than the usual safe-seeming sexy parts (cleavage, shoulders, legs) can feel subversive and new, and invigorating to witness. The wearer is not just confident but completely lacking in shame, unconcerned with any negative opinions about her body or harsh judgment of her morals. It reminds us that we all have different-looking bodies brimming with idiosyncrasies under our clothes, the neck-down version of eschewing makeup: breasts shown as they are, uneven and droopy and braless, a far cry from the padded push-ups of the Victoria’s Secret era of popular sexuality.
The trend has taken hold at a time when modes of femininity are multiplying across political lines. Some conservative leaders are portraying themselves as cruel, kitchen-bound mother figures; others are posing in MAGA thong swimsuits. Even the category of tradwife, a label for adherents of a movement promoting traditional gender roles and female domesticity, contains multitudes. There are tradwives on social media whose wardrobes exude back-to-the-land simplicity or 1950s modesty, but many lean into the fetishization of simplicity and modesty, with artificially plumped lips and décolletage peeking out above their aprons and prairie dresses. (Just look at Nara Smith, a Mormon TikTok influencer, who makes ketchup from scratch wearing an off-the-shoulder, formfitting minidress that looks like a “sexy farmgirl” Halloween costume.) Thrilling to a fantasy of subservience to men does not require these women to give up the permissive social and sexual mores won for them by the feminist movements they disparage.
The politics of sheer clothing can be read as vaguely progressive, in that it’s a trend mostly confined to fashion-forward urban locales that lean left. On this end of the political spectrum, too, no matter what fashion critics say, there is no broad consensus on the appropriate amount of skin to show. Baggy T-shirts and JNCO jeans are back, baby!
But the stickiness of the translucent clothing trend seems of a piece with the prevailing vibe on the left as authoritarianism surges around the world and each passing year is hotter than every year before. The sense that things may only get worse from here, and that the window of opportunity to turn things around is shrinking fast, is propelling people toward YOLOism. At its lightest, it’s brat summer. At its darkest, it’s a low-key flirtation with nihilism. Humanity appears bent on destroying itself, the things we thought mattered to voters don’t actually matter anymore, and the worst people in the country are routinely rewarded with the most powerful positions we have. Why shouldn’t we throw out the unwritten rule against showing our butt cheeks at Whole Foods? This spring, a Who What Wear headline advised, “Life Is Short, so Buy the Trendy Sheer Pieces You’re Eyeing.”
The political moment adds a sheen of irony to today’s turn toward naked dressing. While people are taking more control over what parts of their bodies they present to the public and how, laws regulating what they can actually do with their bodies are growing stricter. In states across the U.S., we can no longer legally end our pregnancies; in a growing number of places, transgender people have lost access to the hormones and surgical interventions they need to fully embody themselves.
The convergence of these two seemingly conflicting trends—increased agency in our wardrobes, punitive crackdowns on our health care—is no coincidence. If we can’t get the hormones we need to keep our bodies functioning as desired, or be sure that doctors will offer timely treatment if we are bleeding out from a miscarriage, we can still choose how much of our body is showing when someone else decides what happens to it. When the FDA revokes access to abortion pills in blue states and a coterie of alleged sexual abusers step up to run the country, we can flounce around in our tulle and lace, taking small bits of pleasure in offering glimpses of our underwear to strangers. Our bodies may no longer be ours to govern, but at least they look like it.
There is certainly a sense of power to be gained from freeing the nipple in places where few nipples have gone before. Some have argued that leaving the house next to nude allows women to “reclaim their bodies” for themselves. But in today’s political climate, it does not feel like a triumph, nor like a successful reclamation. Deprived of rights and freedoms as a class, women and trans people are grasping for bodily autonomy as individuals instead. The material we’ve gotten our hands on is pretty darn thin.
