Why Bandage Dresses are Back and What That Means for Your Wardrobe

In fashion, boomerang trend cycles are nothing new. Like an escaped birthday balloon, there is an accepted element of what goes up must come down. Over the last decade we have been happily drenching ourselves in the loose comfort of oversized items.Frankie Shop large shouldered blazers, baggy wide leg jeans and dresses with swathe rather than skim.

Demna, the incoming creative head of Gucci having revolutionised Balenciaga, has arguably been the initiator of the oversized-era. His giant size tracksuits, suiting and floral lazy-girl-cool dresses set the mood for the last ten years of trend cycles, kicking off an air of unfitted nonchalance in our wardrobes. The pandemic supercharged this expectation of comfort. But we are five years on from that.

In a recent interview with German newspaper Die Zeit, Demna himself signed the deathknell. “Today, oversize is part of mainstream fashion, but really not in a good way. Oversize doesn’t interest me so much anymore.” Oof.

The about-turn scene was set last September when Kaia Gerber appeared in a new version of the white Hervé Leger bandage dress her mother Cindy Crawford wore to the 1993 Oscars. Hailey Bieber followed suit in April, and so the sexy, clingy ball rolled back.

Fitted, unforgiving and body-conscious, the bandage dress, initiated by Azzedine Aläia in the eighties and picked up by Hervé Leger in the early nineties as a career defining signature, has long split the style jury. An impressive feat of fabric engineering and body-enhancement or a constricting (Leger’s are famously hard to move in) reductive move to tighten women into a binding body ideal?

As in their heyday, and noughties revival era, the resonance of the style is strong. At rental agency By Rotation, searches for bandage style dresses have surged an extraordinary 3300 per cent year on year. In the US, Puck reported that at Rent the Runway, “hearts” for Hervé Leger have risen 68 per cent in the past twelve months, with bookings per unit up 35 per cent.

The late noughties adoption of the style – which like Roland Mouret’s similarly body conscious Galaxy dress – ran the celebrity starlet gamut from Rihanna and Victoria Beckham to Carol Vorderman.

In an era when women’s bodies were relentlessly scrutinised, and Heat magazine and Perez Hilton were ready with a felt-tipped “ring of shame” for those which were deemed unacceptable, it was the perfect show off foil for yoga-honed limbs.