The Bandage Dress Is Back

The Bandage Dress Is Back

The bandage dress is back, and it is the rerun everybody actually watches. After years of loose slip dresses, tight reads new again. This edit runs from black to colour and ends on the short version that started it all.

Black bandage, bodycon and ruched

Black is where the bandage dress made its name and it remains the most wearable version. The construction holds a line on its own, so the dress does the shaping and the styling can stay bare.

 

Hervé Léger is the label credited with inventing the bandage dress, and its Opening Night Dress in black and white is the one to start with. Haelo's Elastic Brace Mini Dress and Brace Bra Dress use banded elastic the way the original did, and Norma Kamali's Walter Midi Dress and halter mini are the jersey versions I would wear most. For the easy end, the superdown Kenz and Kass are plain bandage dresses with nothing to explain.

Bandage and bodycon

Street-style collage of 11 outfit photos featuring bandage dress, scattered and overlapping

Colour and shine

Colour is the update. Bright and metallic bandage reads as a knowing revival rather than a leftover, and it is the version that turns up on going out feeds rather than in old photographs.

 

Alex Perry is where I would look for the grown-up version. The Sydney designer launched his label in 1992 from a studio in Kensington and built it on gowns, corsets and sheath dresses, and you can see that structure in every strapless mini and drape dress here. I would start with the Strapless Tucked Mini, the Off Shoulder Dress and the Strapless Cupped Longline Corset Mini, which come in black, burgundy, cobalt, pink, teal and orange between them. For a true bandage dress in colour, Hervé Léger's purple Dance Floor and red Premiere and the hot pink Fleur du Mal are the ones I would try.

Colour and shine

Ruched and bandage minis

Short is the original brief and the reason the silhouette keeps returning. Ruching does the same job as bandage knit with less commitment, and a mini in stretch needs no tailoring at all, which is why it survived from the clubs of one decade into the phone cameras of another.

 

The newer bandage knits sit here too. Retrofete's Avira, Saddler and Persephone dresses and Haelo's Braided Tubular Dress are true banded knits, while SEROYA's Riondra, Deniz and Bella and Fleur du Mal's Hourglass Rib Midi and Knit Bodycon Mini Corset Dress get the same hold from ruching and rib. Coperni's Seamless Dress is the sleekest of the lot.

Ruched and knit dresses

How to tell a good one

This is the least forgiving shape in any edit, and pretending otherwise is how people end up not wearing it. The good ones are heavy, seamed and hold their shape when you pull them, and the bad ones look thin on the hanger. Judge it by the weight of the fabric.