From her breakout role as Kanye West’s girlfriend to her countless viral quotes and even more memorable attire, 2022 was undeniably Julia Fox’s year.
And in 2023, everyone else started dressing like her.
Over the past several months, even a casual observer of celebrity fashion would have noticed that things are getting radically more naked. While famous people are no strangers to flashing a little boob on the red carpet, this year the concept of a skin-baring look has evolved from merely the inference of nudity to full-frontal indecent exposure. And the credit for that recent shift belongs, in large part, to Fox. (And the fashion industry, of course.) Dresses are more sheer than ever before, exposed G-strings are even tinier, and the bare nipple has long since been liberated.
Underwear has also quickly become regarded as outerwear, thanks to brands like Miu Miu, which put Emma Corrin on the runway in a bejeweled brief, and Saint Laurent, which presented a spring 2023 collection composed almost entirely of transparent gowns with just a simple thong underneath. A look that has now been worn by everyone from Hailey Bieber to Demi Moore. And in the year since those collections first came down the runway, we’ve seen their trickle-down effect in the form of some very barely-there clothing. Hunter Schafer transformed a feather into a top for the Vanity Fair Oscars party. Kendall Jenner, Rita Ora, and Emily Ratajkowski all left their thongs out at the Met Gala after-parties. Zendaya rang in her 27th birthday in a Collina Strada bedazzled microbralette. Doja Cat arrived at the VMAs in a thong wrapped in cobwebs, while Tinashe was in a fishnet gown with only a strip of duct tape covering her areolae and outer labia.
And it’s not just the ladies partaking in this skin-baring trend. Lil Nas X attended the Met Gala in a bedazzled silver speedo, Harvey Guillén wore a black brief under a lace jumpsuit to the Vanity Fair Oscars party, and Troye Sivan wore Baroque lucite pasties during Paris Fashion Week.
Celebrities are going to all-new lengths with their public displays of nudity in an attempt to win back our ever-shortening attention. Most recently, Kim Kardashian even launched a bra featuring a trompe l’oeil rock-hard nipple, so you can make sure people are thinking about you naked even when you’re fully clothed. And while she might not have realized it, by becoming the focal point of the cultural conversation last year, Fox and her very suggestive attire irrevocably shifted the Overton window of what we consider to be shocking celebrity street style. At the same time, her daily pap strolls also laid bare a PR formula long utilized by the D-list, which is simply the more outlandish you dress, the more headlines and media scrutiny are generated in response.
One would think that this sudden onslaught of bare skin would shake the puritanical American public to its core, but instead we seem to be getting increasingly desensitized to all iterations of lingerie-inspired dress by the day. Even Josh Safdie’s muse has had to rethink her usual tabloid-bait fashion to keep up with the extreme definition of what constitutes scandalous attire. Ever on the cutting edge of public outrage, in September the actress attended the launch of Naomi Campbell’s PrettyLittleThing collaboration wearing little more than a chastity cage and a trench coat.
