Picture the scene: it’s 2010 and you’re getting ready for a night out. Your hair is dip-dyed pastel blue, you’re borrowing your friend’s baby pink bandage dress (and fake ID to boot), and dabbing concealer artfully on your lips. Your eyelashes are clumped thick with five layers of mascara, and with a WKD in hand, you feel like you’re about to take on the world. The bandage dress means you can’t properly dance, so you totter downstairs and move in a penguin-like manner, singing along to “Somebody That I Used to Know.”
Everything else might be left in the 2010s, but bandage dresses are coming back in fashion. And despite my mostly fond memories of the trend, I’m not excited.
The early 2000s staple, first invented in the mid-1980s by Hervé Léger and shown on the runway in 1992, is the latest Y2K trend to get a revival. Worn by everyone from Rihanna and Victoria Beckham to Kim Kardashian and Leighton Meester’s Gossip Girl character, Blair Waldorf, it was everywhere. However, this is more than just fashion news – and although on the surface it might seem inconsequential, the bandage dress holds a lot of meaning in its bodycon strips of fabric.
The clothing brand House of CB launched their latest campaign last week, hashtagging the claim that #BANDAGEISBACK. Reactions have been mixed. Some commented simply “No,” while others said, “The trauma of this type of dress, of not being able to move comfortably lol,” and “No, please, true recession signs.” It hasn’t all been negative, though. Some women are welcoming bandage dresses back and rejecting milkmaid and cottagecore trends, saying: “FINALLY! We were tired of the Little House on the Prairie vibes.”
So, why am I worried? Although bandage dresses remind me of a simpler time in life, they also remind me of a time mired in diet culture. A diet culture that never really left, but has once more been growing stronger. At the time, young girls were told that bandage dresses weren’t for them if they had a visible stomach, but that they also weren’t for them if they didn’t have the ‘right’ amount of curves. The dresses simultaneously encouraged us all to ‘suck in’ while giving the illusion of curves. To wear one, you had to be thin but not too thin, long-legged, and have a body capable of being smushed into strips of fabric.
There was, and still is, a false narrative that bandage dresses were universal – flattering on all body types. And while I find the idea of body types and trends inherently toxic, it was also just not true. These dresses were rarely available in sizes larger than 12, and I don’t recall seeing a single plus-size celebrity wear one.
“When your fans start asking for your bathwater, you can either ignore it or turn it into a bar of Dr. Squatch soap.”
In 2010, I passed these informal tests and squeezed myself into a size six Karen Millen number (that I couldn’t afford, but a friend could) most weekends. The dress rotated through our friendship group like The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants – except it did the opposite, and only fit one homogeneous body type. We would barely eat before putting on the dress, despite heading out for long nights of underage clubbing and house parties. I remember sneaking into my friend’s kitchen one night in search of toast after finally releasing myself from the shackles of the dress, able to breathe properly for the first time in ten hours.
Bandage dresses, ultimately, were companions to diet culture. And it’s no coincidence that they’re trending again now. We’re in another phase of societal obsession with thinness – a rapid one – and fatphobia often walks hand-in-hand with the global shift to the political right and the rise of fascism.
Kate Manne, feminist philosopher, recently wrote in her Substack Why Are Celebrities' Bodies Shrinking? about this correlation: “The rise of authoritarianism, and the way women can signal their deference to the powers-that-be by conforming to a certain ideal of conventional femininity. The ideal woman today is very thin, white, highly feminine, and projects a certain frailty without actually being ill or disabled. She is Melania Trump; she is Hannah Neeleman of Ballerina Farms; she is a tradwife. She is a woman who the men in power will happily date and marry, partly because her appearance telegraphs wealth and health and effort. And her frail body suggests someone in need of a strong man’s protection.”
With the rise of SkinnyTok (now blocked by TikTok), a growing cultural obsession with semaglutide injections, plus-size public figures shrinking in unison, world powers dominated by men attempting to roll back the rights of women, people of colour, and LGBTQIA+ communities, and a peak in online fatphobia – the return of bandage dresses feels like yet another blow. Death by a thousand cuts.
It might seem like just a dress, but it is never just a dress. Fashion trends for women are never created or pushed without motive, and the overwhelming messaging right now is that we should shrink: our bodies, our autonomy, our opinions. Don’t get bandaged into the propaganda.
“There are so many wonderful things about you; don’t lose sight of that when you look in the mirror.”
