Prepare for the Return of the Bandage Dress and Shop These Body-Hugging Styles
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From low-rise jeans to butterfly motifs to rimless shades, the early aughts have officially had a stylish comeback. Fashion is cyclical, so it was only a matter of time before the aforementioned styles made their imminent return. But it’s not just the early trends of the 2000s that are having their comeback. Next up? The polarizing late-2000s trends seem to be on the precipice of bubbling up once more (yes, this is indeed the era of liquid leggings, peplums, and statement necklaces), starting with the bandage dress.
A bandage dress slightly differs from its cousin, the body-con dress, in that it has panels that resemble bandages. The bandage dress, both historically and currently, has been made most well-known by the iterations dreamed up by French house Hervé Léger. Supermodels like Cindy Crawford and Naomi Campbell donned these body-hugging looks in the ’90s, but the true bandage dress apex sits somewhere between 2007 and 2011, where one can simply glance at any red carpet event and safely bet an Hervé Léger second-skin dress is in the mix on the likes of Kim Kardashian, Victoria Beckham, Lindsay Lohan, or Rihanna.
Aside from fashion’s nostalgia, the resurgence of the Hervé Léger bandage dress is largely due to a post-pandemic return to nightlife. And with it, a new appetite for cut-outs, slinky silhouettes, and mini, leg-baring hemlines. It’s no surprise these styles whet the palate for Hervé’s body-hugging silhouette. Since April 2021, search interest for Hervé Léger dresses increased 74% and search interest for bandage dresses increased 49%. Plus, this spring, perpetually cool-girl Julia Restoin Roitfeld even collaborated with Léger on a capsule collection of ’90s-inspired dresses that squeeze, hug, and constrict the body in all the best ways. And over in Hollywood, Tiffany Haddish was seen sporting a knitted iteration of the bandage dress in August (as styled by none other than Law Roach) and then queen-of-the-aughts Jennifer Lopez also wore the designer for a recent red carpet outing. This version felt like next-gen Léger, but it’s really only a matter of time before we see a full-on throwback to the original bandage dress. Get ahead of the curve and get yourself some Hervé.
