Bring Sexy Back
+ sexiness is evolving, Olivia Rodrigo's babydoll dress drama, LVMH sells Marc Jacobs and more
Hey, hi, hello! Welcome back to Fashion Tingz.
This week, I’ve been working on a few different editorial commissions, and for one in particular, I’ve had to follow a personal curriculum with the aim of better “educating” myself. And all I can say is… it’s a lot.
I also had a chit chat with BBC, speaking on the ‘ugly shoe’ trend and why it seems like they’re everywhere. I have a lot of thoughts on this topic, which will come in a later newsletter, but for now read the full article here.
Tingz Uncut has also seen two new posts published in the last week: ‘I Went To The miista Sample Sale’ and ‘We’re All at a Very Chinese Time in Fashion’. I’m having fun experimenting and evolving the paid content on Fashion Tingz.
— J’Nae xoxo
IN THIS EDITION: Sexiness waves bye to nostalgia in favour of a rebrand. Primark is taking things Stateside. Hailey Bieber is the new face of Mango. Olivia Rodrigo’s latest music video outfits have the internet in hysterics. There’s a new McQueen short film on the way. LVMH sells its old favourite Marc Jacobs.
There was a time when fashion didn’t just suggest sex. Sex walked into the room, made eye contact, and didn’t blink. Think Tom Ford at Gucci in the late ’90s and early 2000s: unbuttoned silk shirts, hip-slung velvet, that unapologetic, high-gloss hedonism. It wasn’t subtle, and it wasn’t trying to be. It had oomph! It had nerve! It had a pulse! Sexy, back then, felt instinctive.
Now? Fashion feels polite. Beautiful, yes. Conceptual, often. But sexy? That’s become a much murkier proposition. Which raises the question lingering beneath so many collections, not to mention street style: is fashion still sexy, or are we looking at relics of a bygone era every time we reference the Ford-for-Gucci years with longing?
A recent TikTok by Mandy Lee put it perfectly: the lack of sex appeal in fashion isn’t really about hemlines or skin exposure at all, it’s about a broader cultural shift. As she argued, conservatism is quietly chipping away at culture, making us nostalgic for periods that felt freer, looser, less surveilled. And I think she’s right. Fashion, after all, has always reflected the emotional climate of the world around it. When culture tightens, fashion tends to follow.
Scroll any runway from the past few seasons, and you’ll notice it: the absence isn’t about nudity. There’s still sheer, still cut-outs, still bodies on display. But the energy has shifted. Because in 2026, showing skin doesn’t automatically translate to sex appeal. If anything, it can feel almost clinical, like a styling exercise rather than a provocation. The industry hasn’t stopped revealing the body; it’s just lost interest in what the body does.
And that could be the real crux of it. Sexiness was never just about exposure; it was about intention. It’s an attitude, an undercurrent you can’t quite quantify. You feel it before you can explain it. The best designers understood that instinctively. Azzedine Alaïa sculpted clothes that didn’t just fit the body; they honoured it, celebrated its movement. Gianni Versace turned glamour into a power play, all confidence and confrontation. John Galliano, at his most theatrical, understood that sexiness lives in storytelling, in suggestion, in drama. And Tom Ford understood better than anyone that sex appeal is less about the garment itself and more about the aura it creates around the person wearing it. That aura is exactly what feels harder to locate now.
So where did it go?
Part of the answer is cultural whiplash. Fashion doesn’t exist in a vacuum; it mirrors the temperature of the world around it. Right now, that world feels cautious. Part politically tense, part socially fragmented, and a whole lot of confusing. There’s a creeping conservatism, not always overt, but palpable, that’s reshaping how we present ourselves. When rights, identities, and freedoms feel under scrutiny and over policed, self-expression often tightens. You see it in hemlines, in silhouettes, in the general mood of restraint.
And ironically, that restraint is happening at the exact same moment we’re more visually exposed than ever before. Everyone is online, all the time. Every outfit is content. Every look is documented, dissected, and archived. Mystery, the lifeblood of sex appeal, doesn’t stand much of a chance when everything is immediately available, endlessly scrollable, and algorithmically optimised. Desire needs distance, which the internet eradicated.
There’s also the issue of performance. Sexiness today often feels over-signposted; it’s trying too hard to be convincing. In a landscape dominated by trends and virality, “sexy” becomes something you can buy into, hashtag, and discard by next week. But real sex appeal? That resists packaging. It’s inconsistent, personal, and slightly elusive. It’s the energy Lee was talking about, something embodied rather than performed.
Which is why so much contemporary sexiness in fashion feels strangely literal. As designers struggle to cut through the noise without crossing increasingly complicated cultural lines, fashion has leaned into visual shortcuts. Think: trompe-l’œil nudity, body prints, and hyper-literal references to anatomy. Its sex appeal translated into graphic design.
You see it in moments like Tyla’s viral tattoo-print top, a garment that mimics skin so convincingly it almost replaces the body itself. Clever, uncanny, but undeniably internet-ready. It’s also revealing in another sense, as fashion increasingly simulates sexiness rather than embodying it. When genuine sensuality feels culturally fraught, the industry reaches for irony, spectacle, or illusion instead.
And hovering over all of this is the rise of “rage bait”, arguably the defining internet currency of the mid-2020s. Clothes aren’t just designed to be worn anymore; they’re designed to provoke discourse. To spark outrage. To become screenshots and think pieces. In this environment, subtle seduction struggles to survive. Sexiness becomes exaggerated, distorted, and detached from actual desire. Less intimacy, more engagement metrics.
Which perhaps explains why there’s such intense nostalgia right now for eras that felt freer, less self-conscious, less mediated. Not because the past was perfect, it absolutely wasn’t, but because it carried a sense of ease. A willingness to be indulgent and excessive and unafraid of glamour or desire. The sexiness of late-’90s Gucci wasn’t just about low-rise trousers and satin shirts; it was about confidence without apology.
Interestingly, some designers today are circling back to that idea. Not by recreating the past wholesale, but by redefining what sexiness means now. It’s morphing into feelings of confidence, ease, control, and magnetism. It’s giving I’m sexy and I know it. Sexiness is no longer strictly tied to body type, nudity, or conventional beauty standards, thank heavens.
Maybe this shift says more about us than it does about fashion at large. Life feels unstable, hyper-visible, and culturally anxious. There’s an understandable pull toward protection, toward covering up, toning down, staying within safer boundaries. Sexiness, in its rawest form, requires openness. A willingness to be perceived without fully controlling the perception. But that’s a hard ask in 2026.
So, is fashion still sexy? Hell yeah. But not in the obvious, high-gloss way it once was. The era of overt seduction may feel like a relic in the present day, but something more complicated has emerged in its place: self-aware, fragmented, sometimes ironic, occasionally compelling. And when it does land, you remember exactly what fashion is capable of.
Fashion hasn’t necessarily lost its sex appeal. But we may have lost our ability to recognise sexiness when it’s not screaming for our attention.
Primark opened a 54,000-square-foot flagship in Herald Square and threw the kind of launch party usually reserved for luxury houses. Derek Blasberg hosted, Kim Petras DJed, Sarah Jessica Parker, Emily Ratajkowski, Andy Cohen and Winnie Harlow showed up, while 3,000 people queued from 3 am, and the Empire State Building glowed Primark blue — fast fashion’s version of canonisation. What’s striking isn’t that a giant retailer can draw a crowd, it’s that celebrities are still willing to lend cultural credibility to companies built on disposable consumption. At a certain point, the message to the industry becomes unmistakable: there is no reputational floor anymore, only market share. As @fatannawintour so aptly put it, this is a recession indicator if we’ve ever seen one. Carrie Bradshaw would’ve crossed the street before queueing at Primark.
Spanish fashion brand Mango has named Hailey Bieber its new brand ambassador and the face of its SS26 campaign. The partnership falls under Mango’s “Craft Your Own Story” platform, though the story in question appears to be: wake up in Los Angeles, drink an iced matcha the colour of sage paint, wear deliberately oversized tailoring, and look faintly inconvenienced by fame. The collection draws heavily from LA street style and Bieber herself, whom Mango says embodies the Californian lifestyle “like no other”. Fashion advertising once sold fantasy. Now it sells algorithmic relatability: the illusion that if you buy the linen co-ord, your life too might acquire soft lighting and an Erewhon smoothie.
Olivia Rodrigo frolicking around Versailles in a babydoll look for her “Drop Dead” music video got the internet hot under the collar. Some viewers accused the look of normalising infantilised imagery, reading it through the lens of post-Epstein cultural paranoia. But the babydoll dress has a longer and more complex history than internet outrage allows. Rodrigo’s styling nods as much to 1960s liberated silhouettes as it does to the riot grrrl-adjacent “kinderwhore” aesthetic worn by Courtney Love in the 90s — a look designed less to invite approval than to antagonise it. The tension is that Rodrigo is a mainstream pop star, packaging an anti-establishment style for mass consumption. But maybe the real debate is where we draw the line between critiquing the marketing of femininity and policing women’s bodily autonomy through their outfit choices.
Russell Tovey and Olivia Colman are slipping into some of fashion’s most mythologised shoes: Alexander McQueen and Isabella Blow. The upcoming short film revisits the partnership between the enfant terrible of British fashion and the editor whose eye for genius was as sharp as her hats. McQueen may have revolutionised the runway, but Blow spotted the spark first. Can’t wait to see this come to fruition.
Kylie Jenner’s mini-me Stormi Webster is already stepping into the family business. The 8-year-old, whom Jenner shares with ex Travis Scott, starred in new campaign photos for Jenner’s brand Khy, serving pint-sized poise with the ease of someone born into the algorithm. In the Kardashian-Jenner universe, childhood isn’t so much a phase as it is a soft launch for brand partnerships and engineered careers.
Nike are letting a bunch of young designers co-create the next Air Max. Names include Diya Joukani from Mumbai, Josewong from Shanghai, Masyn from Los Angeles, Motoi Hatsuki from Tokyo, and more. They’ll be ushering in a new era for the shoe through 3D-printed design, personal storytelling, and a community-driven ethos.
LVMH is doing a little luxury spring cleaning as it’s parting ways with Marc Jacobs. The label is being acquired by New York-based brand operator WHP Global, which described Marc Jacobs as a future “cornerstone” of a portfolio that already includes Vera Wang, Rag & Bone, and G-Star. WHP will own and run the label alongside G-III Apparel Group.
Skin was never the variable. That’s exactly it. The Tom Ford Gucci campaign with the G shaved into the pubic hair is still my favourite ad of all time, precisely because it had intention. Nobody would dare now. I have a half-finished thing in my drafts circling this same idea and you’ve just made it harder to finish, in the best way. Great read!