Em Rata and Kendall Jenner rocking sheer dresses proves sexy’s coming back, and it’s strictly on women’s terms

Fashion has, of late, left little to the imagination. Of the dresses which graced the feted carpet at this year’s Karl Lagerfeld-themed Met Gala, and its subsequent after-parties, there were a few stand-outs. On the carpet, there was Emily Ratajkowski** **wearing sheer Tory Burch gown; at the event’s official afterparty, Olivia Wilde opted for a see-through silver macrame Chloe dress, which Kendall Jenner similarly attended wearing a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it custom Nensi Dojaka bodysuit inspired by a look from Chanel’s spring/summer 1994 collection, which was debuted on the runway by supermodel Nadja Auermann.

The thread that ties the trio together is not that they’re three of the most famous women in the world, nor is it Harry Styles, the ex they all share, but rather that the intrepidly sheer outfits they wore for fashion’s big night out were all designed by women.

‌Perhaps that doesn’t surprise you; after all, barely-there dresses are hardly new news. After the sartorial lull of the pandemic and its subsequent lockdowns, designers endorsed flesh-flashing fashions across the board at the spring/summer 2023 shows. Acne Studios, Bottega Veneta and Valentino all wove varying iterations of see-through dresses into their collections, with the latter dressing Florence Pugh in that famously sheer fuchsia gown at Couture Fashion Week (cue the world losing its mind at seeing a pair of exposed boobs). Their dresses might be transparent, but the industry’s lack of female designers conceiving and crafting sheer designs is less so.