Are we really ready for a bandage dress comeback?

June 5, 2025

As an older Gen Z, my high school years were punctuated by nights out dressed in bandage skirts and dresses in every hue. They were tight, shiny, and unapologetically form fitting, and best worn with a pair of chunky heels and and an even chunkier statement necklace.

Back then, the bandage dress wasn’t ironic or nostalgic. It was the look. On weekends, I emptied my bank account at the likes of Topshop, Kookai, and MinkPink, chasing the silhouette I saw on red carpets. The biggest proponents were celebrities like Kim Kardashian, Paris Hilton, Rihanna, and Blake Lively, who slipped into Hervé Léger dresses, their bodies snatched into impossibly smooth hourglass shapes.

Fast forward nearly 15 years, and I — along with most girls my age — was stopped in my tracks at the sight of Kaia Gerber on the red carpet in an Hervé Léger dress of her own. The 23-year-old model was paying homage to her supermodel mother at the Toronto Film Festival, and doing it in an ankle skimming white version of the bandage shape that had us in a chokehold in the early 2010s. A few months prior, Kim Kardashian also hinted at a revival, stepping out on a red carpet in a bandaged Alaïa bodycon gown that looked eerily similar to the kinds of things she wore when she was best known as Paris Hilton’s assistant.

Of course, like so many relics of wardrobes past, it wasn’t long until the bandage dress trickled down into high street stores. Just this week, cult British brand House of CB declared the “bandage is back”, with a line of figure-hugging mini dresses designed for going out. “15 years ago we started House of CB with our bandage dresses. Back in the day, they became the IYKYK birthday dress for all the girlies, so what better way to celebrate our own birthday by going back to the style that started it all,” the brand wrote on Instagram. Naturally, the comments were mixed. “I’m terrified of this ngl,” one user wrote, while at the other end of the spectrum, a bandage dress fan replied, “The people complaining don’t know the vibe!!!!!!!”

Which leads us to the question: are we really ready for the bandage dress to return?

It’s a loaded comeback. The original bandage dress was a uniform for a very specific kind of hyper-feminine ideal. It came with an unspoken dress code of flat stomachs, push-up bras, six-inch heels, and a full face of makeup. But fashion has changed, and thankfully, so have we, trading the bodycon era for oversized tailoring, ballet flats, and barely-there makeup. Body image politics have similarly shifted, and fashion is no longer as singular in its definitions of sexy or cool.

And yet, its reappearance makes a certain kind of sense. We’re in the middle of a cultural moment obsessed with referencing the not-so-distant past. Y2K aesthetics have already been mined, and now it’s the mid-2010s’ turn under the spotlight. If low-rise jeans and peplum tops can creep back into the conversation with a newfound 2025 edge, why not the bandage dress?

Whether you’re revisiting the look or discovering it for the first time, below, we’ve rounded up some of the best bandage dresses to shop now.