How many ways can one reinvent the bandage dress? Michelle Ochs is certainly giving it her best shot with Hervé Léger’s fall 2026 offering.
Inheriting a 40-year-old brand with an ultra-specific remit is a double-edged sword for Ochs, who walks a line of honoring the Hervé Léger heritage while also attempting to propel it forward. Celebrity placements certainly help. Sydney Sweeney recently wore a hot pink Hervé dress on her controversial Cosmopolitan cover, while newly minted Grammy winner Olivia Dean donned a forthcoming spring 2026 dress over Grammys weekend. “What I love is also that the younger generation is finding us either through references, through vintage, through old runway,” she said. “But, to me, the pieces are timeless.”
Still, while Ochs hasn’t abandoned the party girl staple of decades past, she is looking for new avenues to create intrigue. One such way? Separates. “You’d be shocked they didn’t have a miniskirt here,” Ochs said. (Indeed, I was.) So while Ochs introduced a miniskirt in the brand’s signature bandage material, she also expanded to turtlenecks and shirts of the “going-out top” variety.
Ochs makes a commendable effort to try to push the boundaries of the bandage. Moving away from just the knit down bandage dress, she sought to add dimension. With a red two-piece look, she stitched the bandage down to create a three-dimensional effect. Elsewhere, a blue minidress eschewed the bandage’s aesthetics, instead using the sculpting, snug knit as a base, and layering a diaphanous layer of cobalt on top.
The best piece in the collection abandoned the bandage altogether, instead offering a gesture to the Hervé Léger signature. Ochs fashioned a jacket (which she presented here in cobalt and black colorways) replete with padded shoulders and a subtle peplum, its stitching tracing the contours of the body like a traditional bandage dress might. While Ochs knows that she can’t abandon the brand’s DNA, hopefully she will continue to follow this path.
