The painful-looking mechanics of Chappell Roan’s near-naked Grammys dress

At the Grammy Awards Sunday night, Chappell Roan took the red-carpet trend of naked dressing by female celebrities to a new level by wearing a sheer, burgundy chiffon slip dress that effectively left her topless, with a lower half that appeared to hang from piercings in each of her nipples.

When the singer first arrived on the red carpet, she was covered in a matching opaque cape, according to the New York Times. But she soon shed the cape to reveal a look that was probably far more risqué than any other woman on the red carpet, including Heidi Klum’s latex strapless dress, which was made to look like a naked replica of her body.

As Vanity Fair reported, Roan’s chiffon frock is a contemporary re-creation of a haute couture dress that the late Manfred Thierry Mugler designed for his eponymous label back 1998. When Mugler first showed the dress on the runway it was indeed suspended from the models’ very real nipple rings. Not surprisingly, it made a huge splash at the time.

Vanity Fair reported that Roan — nominated for record of the year and best pop solo performance — has “never shied away from a sartorial challenge.” But with her red-carpet slip dress, the singer didn’t appear to go to the extremes that Mugler expected of his models in 1998. Vanity Fair said it appeared that prosthetics had been applied to Roan’s chest so that her nipples were not on display, or forced to hold up the chiffon fabric, however feather-light it might be.

Still, Roan’s choice to wear the dress was daring in other ways, according to Vanity Fair. Just last year, Carlos Freitas, designing for the Mugler label, debuted a different version of the nipple-ring gown for the Mugler show, and it sparked a fierce backlash and online.

The New York Times fashion writer Vanessa Friedman said that the bared-nipple look was “out of touch” and scoffed at the way designers seem “to think that visible nipples represent the final audacious frontier.” Instead, Friedman said, visible nipples mostly “just make the models look cold.”

Much of the internet also labeled the look as misogynistic, especially with it being presented by a male designer, according to Vanity Fair. In a post-#MeToo era, fashion had supposedly shifted to being “less about gimmick or scandal” and “increasingly more about wearability and commerciality.”

Then again, the Grammys red carpet saw a “generational figure” like Roan donning the Mugler look. Vanity Fair said that her choice to wear the dress could be a way to “recontextualize” it — for some cultural purpose that may soon be revealed. Vanity Fair said that Roan, with matching burgundy hair, “more than owned” the look.

That said, Vanity Fair also noted that Roan initially looked a bit uncomfortable on the red carpet, “intimidated” by photographers and seeming to work hard to get her pose and the dress to “look just right.” And, Roan only wore the nipple-ring dress for the red carpet. By the time she appeared on stage to present the best new artist award to Olivia Dean, she was a bit more covered up in a one-shoulder gown that exposed just a hint of her right breast.