Slip Dresses

Slip Dresses

The slip dress has survived every attempt to retire it. It arrived from lingerie in the nineties, got written off as a costume, and came back as the default answer to almost every dress code that is not explicitly formal.

Underwear that refused to go back

The slip started as something worn beneath a dress and became the dress itself in the mid nineties, on Kate Moss and in every Calvin Klein campaign of the era. It has been revived roughly once every five years since, and the current version is softer and less severe than the one that came before it.

Bias cut, charmeuse, one strap at a time

The reason it keeps returning is technical. A bias cut moves with a body instead of holding a shape against it, which makes silk charmeuse the most forgiving fabric in a dress-up wardrobe and the slip the least effortful thing to wear to a difficult event.

Our honest take

The slip dress is now less a trend than a wardrobe fact, and the only real decision left is colour. The lace-trimmed, lingerie-adjacent versions age faster than the plain ones, so buy the plain one.