One of the fun features of the lull between Christmas and New Year’s is recalling all the highs, lows, bests, and worsts that hit us throughout the preceding year. A recent example of this, specifically in the fashion arena, graced CNN’s pages the other day, sporting the provocative headline, “2025: The year of the naked dress?”

Seen (or not seen) on celebrities from Sydney Sweeney to Halle Berry this year, the “naked dress” is a clothing item “with fabric so sheer or minimal that the wearer looks as if she’s wearing nothing,” CNN explains. “Why did so many designers make these dresses this year, and why do celebrities continue to reach for them?” they ask.

Good question.

The answer, according to those interviewed by CNN, is the same-old drivel about self-expression and freedom.

’The naked dress has never been about exposure for me, it’s about liberation,’ LaQuan Smith, the New York-based fashion designer behind several stand-out naked dresses at this year’s Met Gala, wrote in an email. ‘It’s about a woman choosing to show up exactly as she wants in full control of her presence.’

In other words, the naked dress seems to be the embodiment of feminism, for in removing modesty, we strip men and women of their traditional, separate roles in life.

American philosopher Allan Bloom explains this phenomenon in his book, “The Closing of the American Mind.”

Female modesty extends sexual differentiation from the sexual act to the whole of life. It makes men and women always men and women. … As long as modesty operates, men and women together are never just lawyers or pilots together. They have something else, always potentially very important, in common—ultimate ends, or as they say, ‘life goals.’

Those life goals, obviously, are the proper care and nurture of children. But such work, Bloom explains, requires a different kind of approach or attitude than that required of men and women who work alongside one another in the corporate world, and in such work, modesty plays an important role.

As lawyers or pilots, men and women are the same, subservient to the one goal. As lovers or parents, they are very different, but inwardly related by sharing the naturally given end of continuing the species. Yet their working together immediately poses the questions of ‘roles’ and, hence, ‘priorities,’ in a way that men working together or women working together does not. Modesty is a constant reminder of their peculiar relatedness and its outer forms and inner sentiments, which impede the self’s free creation or capitalism’s technical division of labor. It is a voice constantly repeating that a man and a woman have a work to do together that is far different from that found in the marketplace, and of a far greater importance.

Modesty is removed from a culture, Bloom goes on to say, when society wants to erase the differences between men, women, and their respective traditional roles. This is exactly the mentality advocated by Socrates in Plato’s “Republic,” Bloom explains, which is “why modesty is the first sacrifice” demanded in this famous book.

It seems unlikely that the aforementioned designer Smith has ever read Plato’s “Republic,” yet he somehow reached the same conclusion as Plato; namely, that nudity is all about cutting women off from their natural roles as women.

In that case, perhaps the rise of the naked dress in this last year is actually a signal that the recent “tradwife” trend (i.e. the rise of feminine virtues, stay-at-home-moms, and the increased feminine interest in cooking and raising children) is having a profound effect on society at large. Indeed, this trend seeks to roll back feminism, the very “liberation” which the naked dress seeks to advance.

In the end, perhaps the naked dress is just the airing of feminism’s dirty laundry, a desperate attempt to tear down the differentiation between men and women that is beginning to regain a positive foothold in today’s society.

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This article was made possible by The Fred & Rheta Skelton Center for Cultural Renewal.