'This is a dress cut to show off your best assets, on the assumption that those are Pilates-toned arms'
Every time I think fashion has plumbed the bonkers depths of its own contrariness, it surprises me again. We've had the peep-toe summer boot, the dry-clean-only babygro, the LBD with edible sugar buttons for when you've been overdoing the pre-party diet and feel a bit faint. (OK, so I made that last one up, but it's only a matter of time.) And now, dear readers, we have the anti-bust bustier dress.
A bustier dress – French pronunciation – is, technically, just a dress with no straps that defies gravity by means of engineering in the bosom region. But it has also, since time began, meant bustier as suggested by the English pronunciation. It is a style of dress that celebrates the bust. Or so we thought.
The last time the look was fashionable was the 1980s, when young Sloanes wore the look to King's Road nightclubs, plumptious bosoms hoiked, hair scrunched into Elnetted volume. This year, however, the bustier dress has made a comeback, after Raf Simons took over at Dior and reclaimed the strapless silhouette, giving it pride of place on his catwalk and his in-house celebrities.
There is some smart thinking behind the rebooting of strapless. Ladylike and slightly retro, while also the cleanest, barest, least fussy of necklines, it is the point where Dior's classic femininity intersects with Simons' modern, minimalist aesthetic. However, for this combination to work, it appears that something has to give, and that something is bosoms.
The new bustier dress is cut high, so as to conceal all cleavage, since any vertical crevice would only detract from the architectural symmetry of a horizontal neckline framing the shallow angle of the collarbones. Not only that, it is – in many collections, at least – unforgivingly tight. Where the 1950s shapes were proudly cantilevered out from a tiny waist to a glorious bosom, the new-style bustier dress is a skinny cylinder wrapped around the ribs. No space for boobs within, and no room for them to spill over the top, either. This is a dress cut to show off your best assets, on the assumption that those are the Pilates-toned arms of which modern women are very proud. Breast is best? Not in fashion, it seems.
• Jess wears dress, £2,400, and heels, £610, both dior.com.
Stylist: Melanie Wilkinson. Hair and makeup: Sharon Ive at Carol Hayes Management.