When Kaia Gerber attended the Toronto International Film Festival premiere of her film Shell, she sought out a designer who isn’t as common on the red carpet nowadays: Hervé Léger. The model wore a white full-length bandage dress, a recreation of her mother Cindy Crawford’s 1993 Oscars look. “Kaia had sent me a mood board for TIFF and this was one of her references,” Molly Dickson, who styled Gerber for the event, told Vogue.
While Gerber was paying homage to her supermodel mom, it did give the label a moment in the sun for a new generation. Even for the eldest Gen Z-ers, the French brand’s trademark bodycon silhouette felt out of reach, falling out of fashion before we reached an appropriate age to wear them. “Hervé Léger is the ’90s supermodel second-skin,” Liana Satenstein, host of Neverworns and former Vogue writer says of the dress’s appeal. And, as she wrote in 2022, “an Hervé bandage dress acts as a bra for your whole body—holding you perfectly in place.”
The dress persisted beyond the ’90s supermodel era, reaching the early days of Kardashian fame, teen soap operas, and Transformer movies. As my Millennial colleagues regale the Gen Z staffers with tales about hitting the club in a form-fitting Hervé Léger number, I can’t help but feel a pang of FOMO. But beyond Gerber, it seems that the younger generation is bandage dress-curious. On TikTok, young people who missed the boat last time around are creating a new wave of interest. One video with over 116,000 likes reads, “pov: your [sic] born in 2001 but now your [sic] old enough to own a herve leger dress.” Another proclaimed she was “feeling soooo serena van der woodsen,” referring to a dress that Blake Lively wore on Gossip Girl.
With a cycle of nostalgia-driven trends, it’s no surprise that the bandage dress would reincarnate. “Today, there is an overwhelming sensual mood in the air and a thirst for going out,” Satenstein says. During a recent live shopping installment of Neverworns, she included a rainbow gradient dress with white piping by Léger, which she says “felt right for the world.” It was purchased before the evening was over.
My colleague Margaux Anbouba, Vogue’s senior beauty and wellness editor, told me of her bandage dress days, “Hervé Léger saw me through some of my brightest and boldest moments of the aughts. At the time, I don’t think I had ever felt more powerful than when I put on a bandage dress—the sucked in sausage casing effect was perfect for my favorite pastime of that era, dancing in the club.” May the members of Gen Z get to experience that same joy that only a bandage dress can provide.
