‘Naked-Dress’ Trend Doesn’t Empower Women

Last month, Bianca Censori posed nude at the Grammy awards — an exceedingly horrifying event I had planned on relegating to the deepest, darkest recesses of my memory.

But unfortunately, the model’s stunt seems to be part of a larger trend.

So-called “naked-dressing” was on full display (pun intended) at an Oscar awards afterparty earlier this month. So many women attended the event in so little clothing that The Hollywood Reporter called “naked dresses” a “major dressing trend.”

Those who didn’t partake in near total nudity chose clothing with “lingerie inspirations, black lace and provocative details that included plunging necklines and open lacing,” the fashion outlet wrote, describing frequently obscene shows of skin as “daring,” “high-wattage” and “sultry.”

The mainstream media’s coverage of the afterparty reflects Western culture’s celebration of voluntary public nudity as female empowerment. By rejecting “arbitrary” standards of modesty, the argument goes, women demonstrate ultimate control over their bodies.

This claim has more holes than a “naked dress.”

Even the strongest supporters of this trend recognize nudity doesn’t empower women all the time. That’s why we don’t teach our daughters to walk around naked. But if nudity is objectifying and dangerous in some situations, how does a woman’s agency — her choice to expose herself — somehow make her nudity empowering?

It doesn’t, because public nudity isn’t empowering. Wearing clothes is a protective instinct humans have embraced since the Garden of Eden, when sin entered the world.

This instinct is humans’ sense of modesty and privacy.

People who believe public nudity empowers women typically argue perceptions of modesty and obscenity are relative. At the end of the Reporter’s story on the Oscars afterparty, it muses, “Why do we get so hung up on the idea of bare skin in public? Why is baring the nipple considered such a scandal?”

But, while manifestations of modesty may shift by culture, sociologists say virtually every society on the planet maintains strict boundaries between the public and private.

Sociologist Helen Merrell Lynd argues universal perceptions of what should be private have to do with bodily vulnerability:

The “shame” Lynd references here is the same shame Adam and Eve experienced in Gensis. Eating the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil made them aware of their vulnerability and caused them to cover it up.

God established a post-Fall example of modesty by clothing Adam and Eve before they left the Garden. This standard is expanded upon and codified later in the Bible.

In her book, Repeal of Reticence, social historian and essayist Rochelle Gurstein connects humans’ sense of modesty to our recognition of the sacred. By maligning modesty as prudish, Gerstein argues, modern culture betrays a “scorn for the very idea of the sacred.”

God designed marriage as the place for sharing unclothed human bodies. Violating that guidance neither empower nor frees women — it only separates them from God and his protection.

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Public Nudity Isn’t Empowering