The Bandage Dress

Not everything in the 1990s was loose and understated. The bandage dress was the complete opposite of grunge: tight, sculpted, and designed to show off a figure. It's the dress of the supermodel era, and a brilliant piece of construction.

The dress was created by the French designer Hervé Léger (born Hervé Peugnet), who had worked for houses including Fendi, Chanel, and Lanvin before opening his own label in 1985. Around the turn of the 1990s, he developed a new way of making a dress: instead of cutting it from a single piece of stretch fabric, he built it up from many narrow bands of elastic knit, a blend of rayon, nylon, and spandex, sewn together edge to edge, rather like bandages wrapped around the body. The dresses were usually strapless or with narrow straps, and they reached the knee or mid-thigh.

The construction is the clever part. Because each band is firm and stretchy, and because the bands can be placed horizontally, diagonally, or in curves, the dress acts almost like shapewear on the outside of the body. It holds in, lifts, and smooths, creating a strong hourglass shape without any boning or visible structure underneath. It's the outer-garment version of the smoothing idea behind the 1950s girdle, but worn as the dress itself.

In the early 1990s, the bandage dress became hugely popular with models, celebrities, and anyone who wanted a glamorous, body-conscious evening look. It fitted the sexier side of 1990s fashion, alongside Versace and the new push-up bra, and it looked spectacular in photographs. It also followed on from the 1980s body-conscious knitwear of Azzedine Alaïa.

The business side had a twist: the company was bought by the American firm BCBG Max Azria in 1998, and Léger lost the right to use his own name. The bandage dress was later relaunched with great success in the late 2000s. I think it's a great example of a construction idea becoming a whole style: one clever technique, and a dress that defined a decade's glamour.