Oscar Night’s Naked Dresses and History of the Sheer Look
Don’t blame or credit Bianca Censori: Ye’s wife may have sparked a controversy at February’s Grammy Awards when she dropped her coat on the carpet to reveal she was nude under a decidedly sheer minidress. But the style aesthetic of “How naked can I look?” already had become a major dressing trend at the Vanity Fair Oscar Party — at the Grammys, Censori merely exploited the idea to the extreme.
The naked-dressing theme indeed continued at the 2025 Oscars afterparty event at the Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts in Beverly Hills, where stars including Julia Fox, Olivia Wilde, Megan Thee Stallion, Zoe Kravitz and others pushed the boundaries with their sheer-dressing choices. Lingerie inspirations, black lace and provocative details that included plunging necklines and open lacing were the evening’s other fashion trends.
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Some looks were tame by comparison, others more blatant, but every woman owned it. “I just really wanted to give, like, she’s baring it all at Vanity Fair,” Megan Thee Stallion explained on the red carpet of her olive-green gown embellished with feathers and worn with nipple pasties.
Sheer dressing, of course, is nothing new; the current clamoring for a sheer aesthetic actually can be traced more than a decade back to Rihanna, who wore a sheer dress embellished with crystals, designed by Adam Selman, to the 2014 CFDA Awards in New York. The frenzy of coverage over that uncovering set a tone that, when executed well, naked dressing can reap publicity that simply can’t be purchased. Since then, other high-wattage moments have included Megan Fox at the 2021 MTV VMA Awards, Beyoncé at the 2015 Met Gala and Bella Hadid at the 2017 amfAR Gala at the Cannes Film Festival.
For the OG icon of naked dressing, look no further than Marilyn Monroe, whose infamous “Happy Birthday, Mr. President” sheer gown by costume designer Jean Louis, worn at Madison Square Garden in 1962 for the star’s sultry performance of the song for John F. Kennedy, became the look against which all other naked dressing is measured. That’s likely among the reasons Kim Kardashian wore the gown — and caused a scandal of a different kind — on the Met Gala carpet in 2022.
Several guests of the Vanity Fair Oscar Party seem to love pushing the envelope with naked fashion, inspiring questions that are the polar opposite of body-shaming. Why do we get so hung up on the idea of bare skin in public? Why is baring the nipple considered such a scandal? To that latter query, Jeremy Pope was the lone man to join in on the trend, wearing a leather catsuit that set free one of his nipples.
Ultimately, everyone seemed to escape the party scandal-free, so with that in mind, here are 10 looks that put naked dressing in the spotlight.
Zo? Kravitz in Saint Laurent
Megan Thee Stallion
Olivia Wilde in Chloé
Bianca Balti in Fendi Couture
Julia Fox in Dilara Findikoglu
Emily Ratajkowski in Ludovic de Saint Sernin
Russell Wilson with Ciara in Dsquared2
Leslie Bibb in Fendi
Elizabeth Hurley with son Damian Hurley
Louisa Jacobson in Ludovic de Saint Sernin
Check out all of the Oscar telecast’s red carpet arrivals at the Dolby Theatre, and the night’s best dressed (before the afterparty).
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