The Heidi Klum Celia Kritharioti dress that appeared at Vogue World Milano was, on its surface, a study in transparency: a floor-length black lace gown through which her underwear was entirely visible, constructed without a shaping corset, moving with her body rather than against it. What made it worth discussing, though, was not the exposure. It was the reasoning behind the construction.
A gown from the Celia Kritharioti Fall/Winter 2026-2027 Haute Couture collection
The piece comes from Celia Kritharioti‘s Fall/Winter 2026-2027 Haute Couture collection. The Greek designer’s approach here is worth parsing: the gown combines sheer mesh, intricate floral lace appliqués, and vertical striped detailing, and yet for all its surface elaboration, the structural decision is one of deliberate restraint. No corset. No underpinning designed to redistribute or impose a particular silhouette. The gown drapes, almost weightlessly by the report’s description, and reveals precisely because it does not constrain.
Couture has long operated on a founding paradox: the more extraordinary the construction, the more invisible it is supposed to be. The corset, in that tradition, is infrastructure, the invisible architecture that makes the exterior line possible. To remove it is not simply a comfort choice but a statement about what the garment is for. Here the lace itself becomes the event, unsupported, moving naturally, the craftsmanship made visible rather than hidden inside.
What Klum said about wearing it
Ahead of Vogue World Milano, Klum spoke to Vogue about why the piece resonated. The absence of restrictive underpinnings, she said, made her feel like ‘just Heidi’: nothing dictated a particular shape or distracted from her body. It is a phrase worth holding onto. In an industry whose most elevated garments are frequently also its most architecturally controlling, the appeal of couture that effaces itself, that declines to reshape its wearer, is its own kind of sophistication.
The styling around the dress extended the logic of studied restraint. Diamond pear-shaped studs, several sparkling rings, and a cocktail ring provided the expected couture-event weight of jewellery without competing with the lace’s own intricacy. Black cat-eye sunglasses, worn before the evening began, introduced a note of old-Hollywood deflection: the sunglasses as armour, worn precisely when they are least necessary for their stated purpose. Black patent leather stiletto mules with slim heels completed the monochromatic line.
Before stepping out in Milan, Klum shared behind-the-scenes moments from her preparation on Instagram Stories. Her blonde hair was styled in soft, voluminous waves with a centre part. Dramatic black eyeliner, shimmering silver eyeshadow, peach-toned blush, and glossy nude-pink lips completed the look, a palette that mirrors the gown’s own contrast of darkness and lightness, opacity and transparency.
She posed against the Duomo di Milano before arriving at the event, which added its own layer of deliberate iconography: the cathedral’s gothic lacework facade is, in its own way, an exercise in the same formal vocabulary the gown speaks. Structural complexity rendered as ornament. Solidity that reads as delicacy.
Klum later posted event photographs on Instagram, tagging @celiakritharioti and adding a heart emoji, a piece of social notation so minimal it functions almost as a caption in itself.
Vogue World Milano, as an event, frames itself around exceptional craftsmanship, and the Vogue World platform has consistently used its live spectacle to position couture as cultural argument rather than commercial proposition. The Klum Celia Kritharioti dress fitted that brief precisely: not because it was transparent, but because the transparency was the result of a choice about what couture is permitted to leave out.
