To pull off this look, you’ve got to be, well, a Fox.
At Sunday’s Billboard Music Awards, actress Megan Fox, 35, sizzled in a sheer cutout $1,698 dress from French fashion brand Mugler that featured a cleavage-framing, crisscrossed neckline and see-through draped tulle skirt with a built-in thong.
If the eye-popping style seems familiar, it’s likely because daring, barely-there creations are having a moment — among celebrities daring enough to wear them.
Manfred Thierry Mugler, 72, first debuted the look on the runway in 1998, although since Instagram didn’t yet exist, the mᴀsses weren’t fully aware of its appeal. Mugler quit fashion when his label went under in 2003.
But now, designer Casey Cadwallader, working for a revived house of Mugler, has made these ultra-revealing cutout creations a brand signature over the past several years.
In 2019, Kim Kardashian stunned in a strikingly similar vintage 1998 Mugler gown that seemed to be one shifting strap away from a major wardrobe malfunction.
Inspired by Mugler’s couture pieces of the ’90s, the label’s latest strappy, sheer catsuits have proven particularly popular with sinewy celebrities like Dua Lipa, Miley Cyrus, Irina Shayk and singer-songwriter Billie Eilish, who wore a black corseted version in her cover shoot for June’s British Vogue.
Meant to embody the “comic-book heroine in the fashion space,” according to the brand’s Spring/Summer 2021 show notes, the sculpting styles have subtle design elements to give the illusion that the wearer has an even more shapely bod than meets the eye.
On Fox’s dress, it’s a sheer mesh outlined in black to define her waist. And on the Mugler runway in Paris, Bella Hadid had beige curved panels to shape her torso and thighs.
The brand describes such tantalizing touches as “trompe l’oeil fabrications that accentuate anatomical curves and erogenous zones with unprecedented ease.”
By “ease,” they probably mean “a model bod and strategically placed double-sided tape.”
But if you’ve got it, flaunt it. As Mugler himself put it in film director Robert Altman’s 1994 fashion-world satire, “Prêt-à-Porter”: “It’s all about looking good, helping the silhouette. And it’s all about getting a great f–k, honey.”
