Forget Everything You Thought You Knew About Gingham – 2024’s Dresses Are Stealing The Show

This summer has not been the usual parade of floral dresses you may have come to expect of the sunny season. Instead, fashion has diversified, offering up fresh takes on leopard print, not to mention sell-out polka dot midis which have caused furore on the high street. Gingham, however, is surpassing them all to become the real stand-out dress trend of the moment. Before you bemoan the slightly twee reputation of the gingham dress, I'd ask you banish thoughts of Dorothy heading down the Yellow Brick Road and instead consider the spring/summer 2024 perspective.

Gingham has grown up. While the increasing ubiquity of aesthetic trends like cottagecore have meant that we've seen this familiar check on social media for many summers, this year it just feels a bit, well, cooler. This in thanks, in part, to the likes of Alessandra Rich, who showed that gingham is anything but frumpy with a blown-up gingham midi dress made from an entirely sheer organza, paired with knee-high white boots.

There was also Cecilie Bahnsen, who styled her sheer gingham jacquard dresses in punchy pink with black socks and sneakers, while MSGM paired picnic-ready shifts with grey knee-high socks and sandals.

Online, Californian label Dôen has managed to monopolise much of the appeal for gingham with its vintage-inspired dresses loved by everyone from Dakota Johnson to Kylie Jenner to Taylor Swift. Its Rizzo shirred mini has been a particular hit of the summer so far, alongside the Mallory midi and the Quinn dress.

Net-a-Porter, a stockist of Dôen, says that customer searches for gingham dresses in general have increased by 139% in the last three months – another style popular on site is Bernadette's halterneck mini, which has sold out in most sizes.

Nobody's Child, too, has seen searches for gingham dresses increase by 182% in July, so it's no surprise that it decided to launch a new version of its best-selling Nova dress, this time in a black-and-white gingham. Damson Madder, a similarly prolific brand on Instagram, has enjoyed much success with its bow-adorned Dakota dress, originally launched in a chocolate check but re-imagined in red gingham for spring/summer.

That this year would see gingham dresses becoming almost ubiquitous among the best-dressed is not really a surprise. Last summer, Kendall Jenner reignited fashion fans' interest in Comme des Garçons' spring/summer 1997 collection, titled Body Meets Dress, Dress Meets Body, when she wore a blue gingham dress sourced from Aralda Vintage in LA.

Previously, Bella Hadid wore the same archival piece in pink and thus began frantic searches for other styles from the collection known as the 'lumps and bumps' show due to the gingham dresses being stuffed with filler to distort the silhouette. If Rei Kawakubo thinks gingham can be groundbreaking, who are we to argue?

Shop: The Best Gingham Dresses 2024

Hannah Banks-Walker is Grazia's head of fashion commerce. She has previously written for the likes of Harper's Bazaar, The Financial Times, Glamour, Stylist, The Telegraph, Red, i-D and The Pool on everything from fashion to curly hair (hi!) to the patriarchy. Not necessarily in that order. Find her on Instagram and Twitter. But please don't look for her MySpace profile, which until now was the last time she wrote about herself in the third person.