Why the Bandage Dress Comeback is Sparking Controversy – Are You Ready to Wear It? – Page 4

The resurgence gets its fuel from TikTok, where #bandagedress has 17.3k global posts and saw an over 130% increase in posts in the last three months. #houseofcb has 37.3K global posts with an almost 40% increase in posts in the same time frame whereas #herveleger witnessed a 130% increase, but with a much smaller starting point. Posts feature young twenty-somethings trying bandage dresses for the first time, scouring Poshmark for OG styles—or digging them out of their mom’s closet—and comparing them to lower-priced dupes available on the primary market. Other content features millennials commenting critically on the trend, sharing their own 2009 bandage-clad club memories.

“Everyone has a story about this dress,” says current Hervé Leger SVP Melissa Lefere-Cobb. The brand was founded 1985 and relaunched in 2018 after a change in ownership, appointing new creative director Michelle Ochs in 2023. Though the team is working to refresh the Hervé Leger identity, they’ve admittedly benefitted from this wave of nostalgia. They’ve seen an 80% increase in bandage dress sales year over year (a 50% increase overall) and their Tiktok following has surged about 300%, with videos about the bandage dress hitting near a million views for the first time ever.

Though Hervé Leger hopes to cater to event dressing for bar mitzvahs and 40th birthday parties alike, Lefere-Cobb credits the Gen Z girl for the current spike. Throughout the bandage dress’s history, it has certainly been favored by young, slender women thanks to its bodycon silhouette. The technology of the fabric compresses and lifts your figure—“a bra for your body,” creative director Ochs calls it—but it can also be unforgiving. The TikTok surge is dominated by tiny 20-somethings, though there are certainly exceptions of those both critiquing and celebrating its fit on larger figures (higher-quality styles like those of Hervé Leger often produce better results.) One creator posted a video of herself in a pale pink bandage, saying “POV you finally found the confidence to wear a bandage dress, 10 years too late.