The bandage dress is almost always credited to Hervé Léger, and almost everyone who repeats that has it wrong. Léger's version, the painfully tight strapless thing that became a 2000s red carpet uniform, did not arrive on a runway until the early 1990s. The silhouette he is famous for had already been on working models in Paris for half a decade by then, knitted in soft stretchy viscose by a small Tunisian man who was a foot shorter than most of his clients and who pinned dresses directly onto their bodies in the small hours of the morning. Azzedine Alaïa's spring/summer 1986 ready-to-wear was the moment the form arrived complete: a black satin-knit halter bodysuit, open at the back, married to a high-waisted bandage pencil skirt with diagonal seams and a side lace-up. ReSee's archive listing of the original S/S 1986 bandage ensemble is one of the rare places you can still see the construction up close.

What I find interesting is what the dress was answering. The mid-eighties was the high water mark of power dressing, a silhouette of padded shoulders and structured jackets borrowed from menswear and inflated, designed to claim space in rooms that had recently begun to admit women. Thierry Mugler had been building those rooms architecturally, in patent leather and chrome. Alaïa pulled in the other direction. His answer was a body that was not armoured but held; not enlarged but articulated. The Egyptian-mummy references he gave to interviewers were not idle, the wrappings were meant to evoke preservation and protection rather than constraint. The French philosopher Michel Tournier later wrote that the dresses allowed women to be held as tightly as possible while remaining free, a sentence that sounds like marketing copy and is in fact closer to the truth of how the material behaved. The Alaïa knit gave back when you breathed. Léger's bandage, when it eventually arrived, did not.

By October 1985 the trajectory was already legible to anyone paying attention. Earlier that year he had been named creator of the year at the Oscars de la Mode, France's short-lived Jack Lang-era state fashion prize, and had walked onto the stage with Grace Jones, who was wearing one of his fuchsia bandage dresses and a dazzling smile. The press had already christened the look the sexy mummy. Bill Cunningham, reviewing the spring 1986 Paris shows for Details, would write that the season had been defined by the major houses shamelessly copying the hourglass silhouette of Azzedine Alaïa. He was, by any working measure, the most imitated designer in Paris that year, and the imitation continued long after he had moved on, eventually attaching to a different name entirely.

There is a small footnote here about how authorship gets allocated in fashion. Alaïa never operated like a brand. He showed off-calendar by the late 1980s, refused the press machine entirely, hand-stitched garments directly onto Naomi Campbell and Linda Evangelista in his Marais studio, and let buyers and editors travel to him on his schedule rather than theirs. Léger by contrast was a brand from the start, marketed aggressively, quickly licensed, and by the late nineties the bandage dress belonged to him in the public mind, the way the wheel belongs to whoever sells the most cars. The historian Olivier Saillard, who curates the Fondation Azzedine Alaïa archive, has called the appropriation a strange contradiction; I think it is simply what happens when one party treats the work as the point and the other treats the work as the asset.

The original ensemble still sits in ReSee's vintage inventory at six and a half thousand euros, hand-selected for the archive by Pieter Mulier, the designer who now runs the Alaïa house. The satin knit, forty years on, is reportedly still soft.

Sources: