When I was a skinny, shy 10-year-old, my idea of sexy boiled down to one woman: Jessica Rabbit. She was an apparition of hourglass curves and long red hair coiffed like Veronica Lake’s, who worked the room in a sparkling, siren-red dress that seemed practically drawn onto her body. Technically, it was.
The irony that Ms. Rabbit was a cartoon figure sprung from the 1988 film, “Who Framed Roger Rabbit,” was hardly lost on me once I matured enough to recognize her embodiment of sexy was the stereotypically fantasized kind. It was the sort of sexy that drove men cuckoo, their wide eyes entranced and all awoooooogah, while other women watched on, filled with jealousy or envy. And the younger me fell for it. Jessica Rabbit, the fleet of swimsuit-clad lifeguards on “Baywatch,” Frederique van de Wal and her cohort of lingerie-clad Victoria’s Secret models…they all represented my juvenile understanding of what sexy was, informed by the reactions they elicited from the opposite sex.
Not surprisingly, I never grew up to be “Jessica Rabbit” sexy. Even as my definition has expanded—shifting from the gaze of others to something more nuanced and personal—I’ve still struggled to identify with it. “Sexy isn’t something others bestow on you. It’s whether or not you feel it,” a best friend told me. She’s right, although others often influence how one feels, whether the immediate sense is sexiness or something that stokes it. I asked what makes her feel sexy: “When you hold somebody’s attention.” Same for me. Being wanted—truly, obsessively, even if just in my imagination—gives me a dizzying hit of confidence that makes me feel something close to sexy, if only for a heartbeat.
Jennifer Zuccarini, founder of lingerie brand Fleur du Mal, agrees that confidence is key to radiating inner sexiness. For her, it’s as attainable as doing something generously for ourselves, like wearing a fabulous lingerie set or getting in a good workout. “Maybe you get your hair blown out the way you like it, and you just feel a little better. Even if no one else notices—you did this thing for yourself—and you feel more confident,” she said. “It’s a little secret with yourself.”
I’ve always found others who emanate a quiet, even mysterious aura of self-satisfaction to be deeply sexy, so perhaps it’s time I practiced it myself. There was no shortage of provocative mystery on the runway at Tom Ford’s spring 2026 fashion show, which opened with a trio of models slinking down the catwalk in dark sunglasses and tightly-cinched patent leather coats that gleamed like liquid. They were impossibly sexy, precisely because of what wasn’t revealed, leaving one’s imagination to run wild. These are women who know exactly what they’re doing, I recall thinking at the time. And truly, they did. According to creative director Haider Ackermann, their mandate was to seduce without seeming intentional. It worked. Between the darkened setting, the models’ cool nonchalance, and Ackermann’s talent for making deeply languid suiting, I was entranced, but also inspired. Why not let my shy side settle comfortably in the shadows, where the allure lies not in what I say, but in what I withhold?
There were similar currents of dark glamour at Saint Laurent, where slippery-looking transparent trenches, leather pencil skirts, and subversive pussybow blouses composed a de facto uniform for after-hours thrills. Feeling emboldened, I recently purchased a vintage, early ’80s-era slim leather skirt—coincidentally, also by Saint Laurent. Similar in style, only in a deep midnight navy, the smooth, supple leather feels incredible against my hips and thighs. It’s the sort of skirt that doesn’t shift how I walk so much as alter the entire way I move. I don’t rush, I prowl. And on more than one occasion, I’ve found myself stroking my behind and down the back, unconsciously running my palms over the skin-like surface. If the first step to feeling sexy and seductive is to seduce oneself, then maybe I’m closer to that goal than I thought.
At Givenchy, creative director Sarah Burton also presented several leather pieces, this time as dresses with single shoulder straps that loosely fell down the arm, and a sarong-style skirt with a matching bra top. But feeling sexy demands more than just the simple act of wearing more leather, otherwise someone would have clued me into that fix a long time ago. Backstage, Burton talked about flipping the script: empowering her women through feminine archetypes versus those more often prescribed by the male gaze. The collection had a visibly softer, more relaxed and unworked quality, with exaggerated silhouettes shaped like womanly curves. Burton knows all too well that women’s lives are complicated enough—in many ways, beautifully so. Here was her encouragement to own it, and on our own terms, too, unburdened by someone else’s fantasy so that we can live out our own. How sexy is that?
I thought of Zuccarini’s philosophy, her belief that the endorphin rush triggered by simply doing something special for myself is sexy on its own, no one else required. And, as Burton expressed through her designs, living a self-possessed life is deeply sexy, most of all for how desirable it is to ourselves. Envisioning myself as sexy might be as effortless as no longer declaring that I’m not.
