In 1994, Donna Karan sent a model down the runway in a jersey dress with a cut that ran from the armhole to the hip, showing the full side of the torso. The fashion press called it daring. Women who bought it understood something more precise: the cut was structural. It was doing something to the silhouette, pulling the eye from shoulder to hip in a single unbroken line, making the figure read as longer, more architectural, than it actually was. The side-boob, as the press would eventually call it, was never exhibitionist. It was engineering.
The cut has held its place in every decade since. It appears on Saint Laurent evening gowns and on cotton holiday dresses picked up in a market in Ibiza. The architecture is the same regardless of the price point: a deliberate opening in the fabric that changes how the body reads. What has not changed is the question it raises before you leave the house.
What the Cut Is Actually Doing
The open-side cut works by exposing the lateral torso, the territory from the underarm to somewhere above the hip. The range of exposure varies. Some cuts are conservative: two or three centimetres of gap, barely noticeable when standing still but alive when the body moves. Others are extreme: a full panel of fabric removed, the opening running the length of the ribcage. The visual effect in either case is the same elongation of the figure, but the exposure range determines what is possible in terms of what you wear beneath.
What the cut is also doing is removing the infrastructure that a conventional garment provides. A standard dress holds its side seams together and creates an interior that a bra can work within. An open-side cut removes that seam and the interior. Whatever you wear, or choose not to wear, is now visible from the side. This is the design intention, and working with it rather than against it is the only approach that makes sense.
The side-boob aesthetic belongs to a tradition of architecture-in-fabric that runs through Halston, Azzedine Alaia, and into the work of contemporary designers like Nensi Dojaka, whose cutout lingerie-dress hybrids became one of the signatures of the early 2020s London scene. What these designers understand is that the exposure is the statement. Trying to hide it produces incoherence. The garment is designed for a specific relationship between the body and the air around it.
The Conventional Bra Problem
A conventional bra fails an open-side cut on three counts. First, the band: any bra with a back band or side band will be visible through the opening and will sit in the frame of the gap like furniture left in a room after renovation. Second, the underwire or foam: the structure that makes a conventional bra a bra is positioned exactly where the open-side cut places its opening. Third, and most critically, the side of the cup: the lateral coverage of a standard bra extends into the side-boob zone by design, because that is what makes it functional in a standard garment. In an open-side cut, this coverage is the exact thing you are supposed to eliminate.
Strapless bras with side boning have the same problem. Adhesive bras with wide side wings, same problem. The geometry of the conventional lingerie industry is oriented around containing the breast from all sides. The open-side cut requires a different orientation entirely: coverage from the front only, nothing from the side.
What the Dress Requires
The open-side cut is best navigated with coverage that starts and ends at the front. Silicone covers shaped to the nipple and the immediate surrounding tissue, with edges that thin to almost nothing, allow the dress to behave as designed. The side is clear. The opening reads as intended. The fabric falls without interruption.
On a well-constructed open-side dress, the fabric on either side of the opening is stabilised by seaming or boning at the front and back panels. This means the opening holds its shape when you move. The dress knows where it is. What you need is coverage that respects that geometry: contained, front-facing, with no lateral wing. Medical-grade silicone covers from Korea do this. Ultra-thin at the edge, less than half a millimetre where the material meets the skin, they disappear at the boundary. Good for fifteen or more wears, and the adhesive releases cleanly at the end of the evening.
Skin tone matters here in a way it does not for a covered garment. Most covers come in a small range of tones. For lighter skin, most standard options read as genuinely invisible. For deeper tones, the same cover will be visible under side lighting. This is worth solving before the event, not at the mirror twenty minutes before leaving. Natural or warm light is more forgiving than a bathroom's overhead fluorescent, but neither is the lighting condition you will be in all evening. Test in the light closest to where you are going.
The Tape Approach: What It Can and Cannot Do
Surgical-grade body tape is the other tool in the open-side arsenal, and it solves a different problem than silicone covers. Tape is used to position the garment itself: to anchor the front panel of the dress to the chest so the opening stays at a consistent width when you move. The dress is attached to the body. This is useful when the garment is cut from a very lightweight fabric, chiffon or fluid silk crepe, that would otherwise shift and reveal more than the design intends during movement.
Tape does not replace coverage. It secures the garment. The two solutions work together on a very lightweight open-side garment: covers for the skin, tape for the fabric. On a sturdier garment, a structured crepe or a firm jersey, the tape is usually not needed. The fabric holds its line without anchoring.
Be aware that medical-grade and surgical-grade are not the same classification in tape as they are in silicone. The range of tapes marketed as fashion solutions varies considerably in quality and in what happens to skin over an eight-hour wearing period. The most reliable tapes for extended wear come from medical supply rather than fashion supply. Leukoflex and similar hypoallergenic surgical tapes are not sold as glamorous solutions, but they outperform the fashion-branded alternatives when the event runs late.
Dress Construction and the Gap Width
The open-side cut is not a single design. The gap width, the position on the torso, the whether-or-not the edges are finished, and the fabric weight all change what the dress requires. A narrow gap, two to four centimetres, in a medium-weight fabric at the side of the ribcage below the armhole is the most forgiving version of the cut. It is also the most common in high-street fashion, where the design is borrowed from designer precedent but executed conservatively. A wide gap, more than ten centimetres, cut into a light silk or chiffon from armhole to hip is the most demanding version, and the version that most clearly requires front-only coverage.
The gap position is the other variable. Cuts placed high, at the armhole or upper ribcage, expose the lateral chest and the upper side of the breast. This is the version that requires coverage. Cuts placed lower, at the waist or hip, expose the flanks but not the chest, and may not require coverage at all depending on the fit of the remaining fabric. Read the garment before you read the category. The category is imprecise. The garment is specific.
Structured garments with open-side cuts often use boning inside the front and back panels to keep the gap consistent. Jacquemus, whose Provence-influenced silhouettes have made the open-side cut a signature of warm-weather Mediterranean dressing, typically bones his side-cut garments so that the opening holds at a fixed width whether the wearer is standing or moving. In garments like this, the fabric is doing the work of architecture. The body lives inside the structure.
The Side-Boob at Night
The open-side cut at an evening event operates in different light than it does in afternoon sun. At noon on a terrace, the lateral exposure is fully illuminated and the whole construction is visible. At nine in the evening at a candlelit table in Cartagena or Marrakech or Rome, the side is in partial shadow and the effect is less explicit, more atmospheric. The dress is doing something to the silhouette even when the detail cannot be precisely seen.
This means the most important moment for the open-side cut is the arrival: the walk into a lit restaurant, the move through a hotel lobby, the standing at the bar in the rooftop light. These are the moments when the architecture of the cut reads clearly. After that, the table and the evening do most of the work. Dress for those first five minutes in the way you dress for a theatre entrance.
The light physics are also relevant to the evening version of this problem. Candlelight and warm directional light from below illuminate skin differently than daylight from above. In candle conditions, the side of the body in a warm, open space reads as continuous tone rather than as specific detail. The gap is present, the architecture is present, but the skin reads as part of the whole rather than as exposure. This is why the open-side cut works better at evening events than it photographs in harsh studio lighting.
Movement and the Architecture
The open-side cut is most fully itself when the wearer is moving. Walking, turning to speak to someone, reaching for a glass: these actions make the cut dynamic in a way that standing still does not. The opening shifts with the movement of the body, the fabric on either side responding differently to the torso's rotation. This is deliberate on the designer's part. The static cut is the structure. The moving cut is the garment alive.
This also means that the solution you choose needs to work through movement, not just at the mirror. Silicone covers with strong but clean adhesive hold through the rotation of the torso and the compression of the ribcage that happens when you lean, turn, and sit. The adhesive surface is contoured to the breast shape and moves with the tissue rather than fighting it. Something that holds perfectly still at the mirror but shifts after twenty minutes of eating and conversation is not a solution.
The test worth running before the event: wear the dress with your chosen solution for twenty minutes while moving normally, sitting, reaching, turning. If it still looks right after that, it will last the evening. If it has shifted, solve the problem at home, not in a restaurant bathroom at ten o'clock.
Summer and the Practical Iteration
The open-side cut reaches its peak frequency in the summer months: June through September in the Mediterranean, November through February in the Southern Hemisphere. The versions sold for resort wear tend toward lightweight fabrics and wider gaps, because the physical premise of the cut is allied with heat. A garment that shows the side of the torso communicates ventilation as well as architecture. The air moves. The body breathes. The aesthetic and the practical are one thing.
In summer conditions, adhesive longevity is worth attending to. Heat and humidity both affect adhesive performance, though silicone covers in medical-grade material are more resistant to both than conventional tape or cheaper covers. The relevant variable is the skin preparation: clean, dry, free of oils and lotions for at least twenty minutes before application. This is not optional in thirty-degree heat. It is the single variable most directly under your control when the environment is working against adhesive longevity.
The open-side cut in summer is also most commonly worn over sun-warmed skin. The skin tone-matching question has a different parameter than it does for indoor evening wear. Sun exposure produces variation across the body. The side of the torso, if the garment has been worn for several days, receives more sun than areas normally covered, and the tone will shift accordingly. This is a minor consideration but worth noting for anyone assembling a wardrobe for a two-week trip where the same dress is expected to perform on multiple occasions.
For more on solutions for cut-out and open-back garments with similar architectural requirements: what to wear under a backless dress.
The open-side cut is generous with the body. It asks nothing more than presence: the readiness to inhabit the architecture the garment provides. When the solution is right, the cut is just the dress. The wearer is the point. That was always the intention.
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