Anyone following celebrity fashion knows that Hollywood residents love to bare it all in a sheer or cutout naked dress. Now, Anya Taylor-Joy and stylist Ryan Hastings are giving A-listers an unusual, but no less exposed, silhouette to consider: the half naked dress.
Back in New York City to promote Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga after its premiere at the Cannes Film Festival, Taylor-Joy stopped by The Late Show with Stephen Colbert on Wednesday, May 22, in an unexpectedly risqué Fall 2024 Mugler dress.
From the front, the piece looks like the sort of toughened up mini Taylor-Joy could wear on a talk show to channel her onscreen alter-ego. Her leather dress has cape-like shoulders that extend into a tight-fitting, ruched bodice, while what looks like black fringe hangs from the right side. Then Taylor-Joy turns around, and anyone passing by realizes they've been tricked. This isn't an ordinary, full-coverage dress.
Ask Taylor-Joy for a 180-degree turn like the photographers apparently did, and she reveals a surprisingly bare design. Taylor-Joy's entire back is exposed, with rows and rows of thin black belts holding the dress together. Some of the burgundy leather wraps around from the front to conceal her hips, but on the other side, there's just a whisper of a belt. The shoulders of the dress don't even cover her actual shoulders; they're constructed to only appear like they're hiding her skin from the front. Voilà, the half-naked dress.
The contrasting fabrics and edgy belt details are a night-and-day difference from Taylor-Joy's Cannes looks, where she hid from the South of France sun under a giant Jacquemus hat and glided up the red carpet steps in a princess-like Dior ballgown. It's even a shift from less than a day before in New York City, where Taylor-Joy attended press in a painterly custom Marni mini dress and a series of little white sundresses.
While stars like Zendaya and Margot Robbie spent recent press tours fully committed to "method dressing," or referencing their characters with their red carpet styling, Anya Taylor-Joy has dipped in and out of nodding to Furiosa's post-apocalyptic setting through her clothing. A number of Taylor-Joy's pieces paid homage to the titular character with a red and black color scheme, metallic hardware, and in one memorable vintage pull's case, spiky arrows all over.
Taylor-Joy has made covering a range of aesthetics—sweet sundresses one day, dramatic half-naked dresses the next—look easy. It's all in service of a movie she recently told reporters was one of her most difficult to create. “I’ve never been more alone than making that movie,” the actress told the New York Times. "I don’t want to go too deep into it, but everything that I thought was going to be easy was hard."
