Words by Faran Krentcil
At a recent all-day press junket, a certain 40-something actress traded her usual dainty Dior clutch for a long, thin Bottega Veneta Andiamo clutch. Woven in fine napa leather and featuring a gold clasp that resembled an old-school police whistle, the $2,950 bag was an au courant runway score—but that’s not why the TV star was toting it. “It’s the perfect shape,” said her stylist, an A-list fashion arbiter who swore me to anonymity, “to safely hold needles for Ozempic and IVF shots.”
“IT’S THE PERFECT SHAPE TO SAFELY HOLD NEEDLES FOR OZEMPIC AND IVF SHOTS.”
Welcome to the era of medical-grade couture, where status bags are covertly built to stash semaglutide, and runway labels use hospital-grade materials to create clinically cool looks. “I think it’s a reaction to all this ‘wellness’ messaging,” says Bridget Scanlan, the designer of KYT, a luxury handbag line made in Italy that creates pebbled leather handbags with pouches specifically for insulin shots, Ozempic syringes, and IVF vials. “There’s nothing wrong with needing medication! Science saves lives. It’s cool to show that off.” As celebrity lifestyle platforms like Gwyneth Paltrow’s Goop and Kourtney Kardashian’s Poosh encourage their followers to seek healing through prettily packaged—and pretty expensive!—herbal tinctures and powders, more shoppers are pushing in the opposite direction, looking to sleek-up their allegiance to modern medicine through beautiful and conspicuous design.
To be sure, “hospital chic” isn’t a new deal. In 2000, Miuccia Prada revamped a classic doctor’s bag in shiny spazzolato leather, along with the label’s chunk silver logo. The purse was so popular, it was resurrected twice by the brand. When Marc Jacobs debuted his Spring/Summer 2008 collection for Louis Vuitton, he transposed the artist Richard Prince’s Y2K-era “nurse” paintings (also used by Jacobs’s house band, Sonic Youth, for their 2004 album Sonic Nurse) onto his Paris runway, dressing 12 models including Naomi Campbell and Eva Herzigova in tidy red cross caps and sheer black surgical masks encrusted with beaded LV logos. And come 2020, runway brands from Collina Strada to Marine Serre and Off-White made their own face masks while Chanel and LVMH loaned their textile machines to the French government for medical supply use.
Two years later, medical equipment had a new moment of fame thanks to designer Donatella Versace and creative director Kim Jones. While On their joint Fall/Winter 2022 runway for Fendace, an opulent one-time collaboration between Fendi and Versace, the designers sent nepo-fab model Lila Moss, then 21, down their Milan catwalk in a rococo-print one-piece swimsuit with bare legs and a similar insulin device. At the 2024 CFDA Awards in New York City, photographer and model Richie Shazam, 33, posed beside designer Kim Shui on the red carpet sporting an insulin pump for Type 1 diabetes on one arm and a Brandon Blackwood purse on another. “I thought about bedazzling it or painting it,” said Shazam, whose frequent collaborators include Chapell Roan and Charli XCX, along with Miu Miu, Ganni, and Valentino Beauty. “But you change them out every three days, so it’s not the most practical thing. Also, honestly? I think it looks cool and futuristic as-is. You do what’s best for your body. That’s chic as f-k.”
“TO GIVE US BAND-AIDS THAT YOU CAN SHOW OFF ON THE LAST DAY OF FASHION MONTH IS SO SWEET AND KIND.”
Today, the easiest way to look so chic it hurts is designer Band-Aids. Miu Miu’s current resort sandals were memorably shown with neon bandages swaddling model toes and heels on the Paris runway. Stylist Lotta Volkova and her team used wholesale medical bandages cut to fit each model’s feet, but you can dupe the effects with a pack of neon adhesive gauze strips from Walmart. (They’re $7.50 a box—perhaps to offset the $925 rubber-and-rope Miu Miu sandals they’re meant to complement.) “To give us Band-Aids that you can show off on the last day of fashion month is so sweet and kind,” Gigi Hadid gushed on Instagram after the show. “I love it.” If you’d rather tend to your paper cuts and blisters with a nod to Stella McCartney, head to the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, where you can buy packs of bandages featuring the same Yoshitomo Nara motifs as her Spring/Summer 2023 catwalk collection. They’re $12.
Band-Aids went less literal for Spring/Summer 2025, but you could still spot them on the catwalks—and later, the red carpet. At Ferragamo, designer Maximilan Davis built “gauze” dresses and leggings made from the same stretchy fabric technology developed for surgical wound dressing in the 1940s. Kaia Gerber wore one of the looks to the Time 100 Gala in October; she also chose a more traditional interpretation of the trend—a vintage white Herve Leger bandage dress in hospital-bleached white—to the Toronto International Film Festival. It was first worn by her mother, Cindy Crawford, to the Academy Awards in 1993, eight years before the model was born. Olivier Rousteing also employed (literal) surgical dressing in his Spring/Summer 2022 collection, inspired by his own emergency surgery after a fireplace explosion covered his body in burns. “I’m unstoppable,” the designer told reporters backstage. “This collection is an homage to that.”
“THERE’S NOTHING WRONG WITH NEEDING MEDICATION! SCIENCE SAVES LIVES. IT’S COOL TO SHOW THAT OFF.”
The medical fashion riffs come as a shot of wry humor for some women with health challenges. “I actually love it when you see surgical stuff being used as fashion inspiration,” says Los Angeles ad exec Michelle Moran, 39, “because that is literally my life right now.” A campaign producer for Sephora and Estee Lauder, Moran was diagnosed with thyroid cancer in 2022, and had several surgeries to clear the disease from her body. After dealing with a complicated after-care regime of countless pills, she asked her husband—a watch designer for Marc Jacobs and Michael Kors—to create a pillbox that “felt like a reward for getting healthy again, instead of a punishment for being ill.” He came up with a steel-and-black marble sculpture that Moran now keeps on her vanity table. The couple sells versions for $425 under the label MM Objects. “People come over and ask who the artist is,” says Moran. “I’m like, ‘It’s my immune system. She’s the designer. She made it!’”
Of course, like all fashion trends, the quest for clinical cool can hit the point of overdose. Witness Free People’s bizarre take on the ditsy floral romper craze started by Zimmermann and Sea New York. Their June 2024 version looked so much like a hospital gown, it went viral on TikTok. “I had this exact outfit when I was in the hospital giving birth,” said blogger Virginia Taylor on the post. “But instead of $55, it cost me $20,000.”
About the cost of one of those Balmain surgical dressing gowns, TBH.
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