Kelly Meharg literally recoils in horror at the thought of the bandage dress making its way back into the sartorial zeitgeist… but should we be embracing it again? (Yes, this is totally just a millennial rant).
I’m not a parent yet but I imagine that one of the hardest parts of having kids is having to let them make their own mistakes.
Sure, you can tell them that it’s not a good idea to sneak onto the local intermediate school’s field in the middle of the night and mix two bottles of beer, a half bottle of Jägermeister, a rogue Archer’s Peach Schnapps that you found at the back of the garage fridge, and a swill of flat Coke together, but they’re going to do it anyway.
You can implore, until you’re blue in the face, that dying your hair bright red will not only look ridiculous, but it’s stupid because your meagre minimum wage job at Glassons means you won’t be able to afford the upkeep and you’ll look like roadkill red panda in six weeks.
You can even tell your daughter that hey, probably a bad idea to date a quasi-famous actor almost twice your age and put all of your romantic eggs in that particularly weird basket because it will inevitably end in heartbreak.
I made all of these mistakes in pretty quick succession near my 21st birthday (in fact they all overlapped, if memory serves me correctly, this is why 20-year-olds shouldn’t be in charge of ANYTHING) but there was one other wild one that happened on the night of my 21st:
Exhibit A.The bandage dress.
Me in my little bandage dress that rode up every time I walked and was held up by glue, tape and pure hope, with my bestie who wore a dress I’d actually still wear now, so good for her (and why yes, I DID find this photo on a Facebook album, thank you for asking)
Sure, I was the size of a twig back then and why not be young and hot in your $79.99 Dotti Herve Leger rip off. It was of the times! (2011, of course.) Everyone was wearing them! And hell, I guess it was better than what I usually wore out to the clubs – I was a FULL follower of the corporate club movement, peplum top, statement necklace and hair doughnut bun included (I even had the pink Sony CyberShot to really *finish off* the look).
It was of the times. True millennial core, PEAK millennial core, worn by our heroes Rihanna, Kim Kardashian, Victoria Beckham in her early fashion era… the unforgiving mummy-esque fit that we paired with huge platform pumps and a jazzy little hair quiff, the ultimate status symbol. Ah, the glory days.
But now I see all over the internet that Gen Z have decided to bring back the bandage dress.
Between this, Lady Gaga absolutely killing it in the music charts again, Harry Potter news thrilling Muggles everywhere and the ice bucket challenge popping off once more – plus the actual shit show that is the economy – kids, are we in 2012 again?!
I can live with side parts and baggy jeans and your abject horror of the cry laughing emoji but my dudes, I just don’t think you know what you’re doing.
YOU guys were the ones who steered us millennials away from tiiiight! We said goodbye to the skinny jeans (a huge thank you for this, me and my straight legs are besties but I will say I think you’ve gone too far with the balloon jeans because… what the fuck). We EMBRACED baggy. We even got over that whole ‘if it’s loose on the bottom then it needs to be tight up the top’ rule that was drilled into us from literally every fashion bible, and visa versa.
But the bandage dress? Queens, enough is enough.
Maybe my horror comes from an ageist (but realistic) place trying to imagine this now 34-year-old body squeezing into the dresses I used to shimmy myself into (a sausage Z’s will be shouting. “Embrace your curves! Who cares! Just wear the dress!” they’ll be crying.
Guys, we’re TRYING but Jesus Christ…. I’m so sorry, I just can’t.
Who can we blame? As always, Hailey Bieber (props to the gal though, my God she can make anything cool again. I’d love to see her take on Groovy Chick).
Where’s *this* look when you need it?
She stepped out in a full-length bandage dress in April and of course the zeitgeist went crazy and here we are, on the precipice of HUGE upticks in Skims and Spanx purchases and those chicken fillet things because they’re so tight you actually can’t wear a bra without it poking through (lol remember the good times).
House of CB, an OG millennial brand, has also decided to bring back the bandage dress, the silhouette they made their name on 15 years ago, for their anniversary and it’s somehow taken off.
Why, I can’t tell you. Why an entire generation who liberated us, their often-judged forebears, from elastane and polyester wants to follow suit, I also can’t tell you.
What I CAN tell you is that from the reactions to my Instagram, where I shared a post that bandage dresses are, indeed, back, we stand at about 98% horror and disbelief with responses such as:
“Nooo”
“Nooooooo”
“You’ve got to be fucking kidding me”
“The kids have lost their god damned minds”
“Awwww WHAT”
“Lol the people who are wearing these now clearly are not the people that were wearing them THEN”.
Even my pal Wilhelmina Shrimpton, a tall, slim gal who naturally possesses a body that would, in fact, conventionally support the wearing of said dresses, commented “I literally can’t with this… the horror”.
(In fact the lone holdout and supporter of the bandage dress came in the form of our resident sexologist and Good B*tch winner Morgan Penn who, in their defence, says that she in fact never stopped wearing them and that she’s been picking them up from op shops for a decade because they make her ass look fantastic and I have to say, I’m here for it).
Maybe my attitude is wrong? The OG bandage dresses were, as I said, of the times, and those times were very different for so many reasons. Sure, we didn’t know about contouring or heatless curls and we hadn’t figured out that, you know what, flats are actually a better option for da club because you didn’t end up ass over tit in Auckland’s Viaduct on a semi-regular basis, but the ideals and attitudes of the ‘10s were, upon reflection, wild. In my experience, wearing said dress wasn’t about feeling confident, it was about showing off just how skinny you were (curves weren’t much of a thing yet, but they were coming). They were a symbol of just how tiny you could make yourself, and therefore, how much more disciplined, more in control, more willing to sacrifice to fit into said dress, you were than everyone else. And I don’t with that era of thinking on anyone.
Maybe today’s bandage dress wearers will instead wear them with the empowerment and joy that this generation has towards fashion and hey, that’s a great thing.
And let’s be totally honest here, my panic about a bandage dress absolutely, 100%, stems from a getting-older insecurity that makes me confront the fact that I’m just too chicken shit to ever wear anything like that again.
Or, just like kids and me at 20 who was too poor to buy booze and had to make a weird jungle juice on the Howick Intermediate field because she spent all her money on red hair dye, perhaps you just have to let the Gen Z’s make their own mistakes.