Every summer, without fail, a fan-favorite dress emerges; a dress becomes the dress. During the pandemic, for instance, the strawberry dress went viral—and everyone on your Instagram or TikTok page was wearing it. Last year, sheer naked dresses were all the rage. It’s no surprise that statement dresses become popular during the season, as they are the perfect, easy garment to wear during a heat wave. And given we are officially entering the summer season next week, we’re currently wondering: What will the breakout summer dress of 2025 be?

According to celebrities, there are already signs of the silhouettes will reign supreme. Over the past few weeks, stars have been debuting their best summer frocks—and the consensus this year is that minimalism is back. (I mean, did it ever leave?). Simple, sleek maxi dresses—from tank dresses to slinky gowns—have been making their rounds both on the streets and on the red carpets. Compared to bold floral dresses (which are often popular this time of year), the new crop of summer sdummer whisper a sense of elegance.

Dakota Johnson Photo: Splash News Cardi B Photo: Backgrid

There have been both day and night approaches to the more streamlined look. In New York City, Dakota Johnson recently stepped out in a white Khaite tank dress that was a perfect choice for elevated day wear. The square neck and calf-length hemline made it feel modern, and it’s precisely the kind of timeless design you can sport for many summers to come. Ditto for Cardi B and her beige bodycon halter dress: With no embellishments or bright colors, it put all emphasis on the figure and her killer accessories. (With Cardi, that always includes a staggering heel.)

For a more formal nighttime feel, meanwhile, simple tank or slip dresses have also prevailed. At the Cannes Film Festival last month, Bella Hadid slinked her way onto the red carpet in a draped black Saint Laurent gown. Again, it was all about the open back and high slit—and less about the dress itself being overly complicated or flashy. In New York, Miley Cyrus wore a black sheer sheath dress; what it lacked in ornamentation, it made up for in drama via a totally-transparent fabrication.

Why do such simple looks feel so right for this summer? For starters, they point to the quiet mood of fashion in general right now: Rather than going super experimental, brands like The Row, Lemaire, and Khaite are all zeroing in on classic silhouettes this season. Clearly, the stealthy-chic trend is resonating, and has now ventured into summer dress territory.

Still, that doesn’t mean your warm weather wardrobe has to be devoid of personality in the months to come. As these stylish celebrities have proven, add a great shoe and fun jewelry, and your look can still have a major impact. Consider these simple dresses your blank canvas—but how you style them, is when a true style masterpiece happens. Start brainstorming, Picassos.

The Met Gala is technically a fundraising event for the Metropolitan Museum of Art, but let’s be honest: It’s mostly an excuse for a bunch of super-famous celebrities to dress in beautifully designed outfits and socialize with each other. Now, this obviously sounds like a blast (would give anything to chill with my husband Timothée Chalemet), but some celebs are…simply not into it and, incidentally, have made their feelings all kinds of known.

While Anna Wintour has only admitted to indefinitely banning one person from the Met Gala, plenty of celebrities are rumored to be banned due to comments they’ve made about the event. Meanwhile, some others have simply made it clear they don’t want to attend. Like, ever again! Time to meet the stars you probably shouldn’t expect to show up on the steps of the Met next year—and the ones who have made surprise returns.

Rachel Zoe

Dimitrios Kambouris // Getty Images

There were rumors that Rachel was nixed from the Met Gala invite list after she : “Anna Wintour is one of my heroes, but they say that I’m more influential. As great as it is, Vogue won’t change a designer’s business. But if an unknown brand is worn by a certain person in a tabloid, it will be the biggest designer within a week.”

That! Said!!! It’s important to note that the comments she made were from way back in 2007 and she was at the Met Gala in 2012, so…¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Donald Trump

Anna Wintour herself confirmed that he was banned, telling James Corden “Donald Trump” when asked which celebrity she would never, ever invite to the Met Gala.

Amy Schumer

Kevin Mazur // Getty Images

Amy’s statement on the Met Gala didn’t get her banned permanently (as far as we know), but she made it clear how she felt about the event during an with Howard Stern in 2016: “It’s people doing an impression of having a conversation. I don’t like the farce…We’re dressed up like a bunch of fucking assholes. I don’t like it. I have no interest in fashion…I don’t care.”

Tim Gunn

We know for sure Tim Gunn was banned from the Met Gala because he said as much in 2016. “It is very true. It is a crazy story, and as far as I’m concerned, it’s a very matter-of-fact story. I was asked what is the most unforgettable thing I’ve ever seen in fashion and I said, ‘It’s easy. It was watching Anna Wintour being carried down five flights of stairs by two bodyguards—two big hulking men—from a fashion show.’ All hell broke loose. It was insane. We’ve had an open war ever since.”

Gwyneth Paltrow

Theo Wargo // Getty Images

The Goop creator made some pointed comments about her time at the Met Gala back in 2013, telling the Kyle and Jackie O Show (per Us Weekly) that “it sucked” and “it seems like it’s the best thing in the world…You always think, Oh my god, it’s gonna be so glamorous and amazing and you’re going to see all these people, and then you get there and it’s so hot and it’s so crowded and everyone’s pushing you. I think we’re all a bit old to dress up punk.”

Apparently, these comments didn’t go over super well, but Gwyneth returned to the Met Gala in 2017 and 2019, so water under the bridge!

Zayn Malik

John Shearer // Getty Images

Zayn attended the 2016 Met Gala with his then-girlfriend Gigi Hadid but made it clear he had no interest in a redo. “Now it’s not something I would go to,” he told in 2018. “I’d rather be sitting at my house doing something productive than dressing up in really expensive clothes and being photographed on a red carpet…to do the self-indulgent ‘look at me, I’m amazing’ thing on the red carpet, it’s not me.”

Tina Fey

Larry Busacca // Getty Images

Another comedian who simply doesn’t love the Met Gala? That’d be Tina Fey, who, back in 2015, told David Letterman, “I have gone to it once and it is such a jerk parade. Clearly, I’ll never go again, but you go and it’s this beautiful space and it’s just every jerk from every walk of life is there wearing some stupid thing. You walk up these huge steps…and I went and I dragged my husband along with me too, which I’m still in trouble for.”

Lili Reinhart

Dimitrios Kambouris // Getty Images

The Riverdale actor attended the Met Gala in 2022 but has openly admitted she doesn’t believe she’ll be invited back after criticizing Kim Kardashian’s rapid weight loss to fit into the dress Marilyn Monroe famously donned to serenade John F. Kennedy for his 45th birthday.

Lili took to her Instagram Stories in the days after the event and wrote, “To openly admit to starving yourself for the sake of the Met Gala. When you know very well that millions of young men and women are looking up to you and listening to your every word. The ignorance is otherworldly disgusting.” “Please stop supporting these stupid, harmful celebrities whose entire image revolves around their bodies. I am not generally an angry person but I swear to god, the toxicity of this industry sometimes really gets to me,” she added.

In a subsequent interview with W Magazine, Lili took a moment to open up about the evening, revealing that it “was fun, but after going again this year, I don’t think I’ll be invited back…I said a certain something about a certain person in a certain dress.”

Welp. On that note, can’t wait for tonight’s event!

The all-female Blue Origin rocket launch may have received plenty of glowing media coverage – but not everyone is impressed.

The stunt has drawn criticism from a number of female celebrities who were not keen on the Jeff Bezos-owned Blue Origin NS-31 mission, which included Katy Perry, Bezos’s fiancee Lauren Sanchez, aerospace engineer Aisha Bowe, civil rights activist Amanda Nguyen, film producer Kerianne Flynn and, in a twist straight out of Apple TV’s The Morning Show, CBS Mornings host Gayle King.

Model and actor Emily Ratajkowski said she was “disgusted” by the 11-minute space flight, which featured Perry serenading her fellow passengers with a cover of What a Wonderful World and advertising her upcoming tour setlist in brief zero gravity. “That’s end time shit,” Ratajkowski said. “Like, this is beyond parody.”

Allow TikTok content? This article includes content provided by TikTok . We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. To view this content, click ‘Allow and continue’. Allow and continue

“You say that you care about Mother Earth, and it’s about Mother Earth, and you’re going up in a spaceship that is built and paid for by a company that’s single-handedly destroying the planet,” she added. “Look at the state of the world and think about how many resources went into putting these women into space. For what?”

The launch from west Texas on Monday, paid for by the Amazon founder’s private space company, met with widespread derision online and countless memes – such as photos of Perry holding up a daisy in tribute to her daughter Daisy Dove Bloom and kissing the ground on her return to Earth, captioned “getting off a commercial flight in 2025 #BlueOrigin”, in reference to a spate of airline incidents this year. Actor and director Olivia Wilde reshared the meme on her Instagram stories with the added caption “Billion dollars bought some good memes I guess”.

Amy Schumer also mocked the flight on Instagram, posting a sarcastic video in which she announced that she got a last-minute invitation to join the mission. “Guys, last second they added me to space and I’m going to space,” the comedian joked while holding up a Black Panther toy. “I’m bringing this thing. It has no meaning to me, but it was in my bag and I was on the subway, and I got the text and they were like, ‘Do you want to go to space?’ so I’m going to space.”

“Thank you to everyone who got me here and I’ll see you guys in space,” she added with the caption “space”.

Allow Instagram content? This article includes content provided by Instagram . We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. To view this content, click ‘Allow and continue’. Allow and continue

In another video posted to her stories, Schumer continued to mock the hype around the flight: “So I’m going to space and I’m so excited. Lauren Sanchez, Katy Perry and Amanda Nguyen have been my guiding lights through this whole journey, which I just got called to be part of this space team this morning. And I’m loving it. I’ve always wanted to go to space, and also I just have to say, How high were the people who came up with the name for space? Were they like, ‘What should we call it? It’s got so much, like, space.’”

Earlier this month, actor Olivia Munn made waves when she questioned the flight’s objective. “I know this probably isn’t the cool thing to say, but there are so many other things that are so important in the world right now,” she said during an appearance on Today With Jenna and Friends on 3 April. “What are you guys gonna do up in space? What are you doing up there?

“I know this is probably obnoxious,” she continued, “but like, it’s so much money to go to space, and there’s a lot of people who can’t even afford eggs.”

Munn also called the flight “a bit gluttonous”, because “space exploration was to further our knowledge and to help mankind. What are they gonna do up there that has made it better for us down here?”

Some of the flight’s participants have defended the launch. Asked by People about overall criticism to the mission during a post-flight press conference, King said that in her eyes, “anybody that’s criticizing it doesn’t really understand what is happening here”.

“We can all speak to the response we’re getting from young women from young girls about what this represents,” the longtime broadcast journalist added. Sanchez then added that the derision got her “really fired up”.

“I would love to have them come to Blue Origin and see the thousands of employees that don’t just work here but they put their heart and soul into this vehicle. They love their work and they love the mission and it’s a big deal for them,” she continued. “So when we hear comments like that, I just say, ‘Trust me. Come with me. I’ll show you what this is about, and it’s, it’s really eye-opening.’”

The NS-31 mission marked the 11th mission in Blue Origin’s New Shepard program, the 31st flight overall and the first all-female mission in the company’s history. It was the first all-female space flight since 1963, when Soviet astronaut Valentina Tereshkova flew into orbit solo.

The company credited Sanchez, who will marry Bezos at a star-studded wedding in Venice this summer, with inspiring the flight. “She is honored to lead a team of explorers on a mission that will challenge their perspectives of Earth, empower them to share their own stories, and create lasting impact that will inspire generations to come,” the company said via press release shortly after the all-female crew was announced in February.

Former Vice President Kamala Harris was among the guests at tonight’s Met Gala.

Former second gentleman Doug Emhoff posted photos of the couple getting ready for the event to his Instagram page. “We spent a beautiful evening at the Met celebrating the Costume Institute spring exhibition,” he wrote in the caption, thanking “all involved for a beautiful evening.”

Harris, the former Democratic presidential candidate, wore a custom black and white dress designed by Off-White creative director IB Kamara, according to Vogue.

“Art has always had a significant impact on not just culture, but also our policies and politics,” Harris told the publication. “Artistic expression—whether it’s dance, music, visual arts, or fashion—has a way of capturing the mood and language of the people without words. Art has the power to shape the conversation about where we are today and where we need to go.”

If you’ve scrolled social media much lately, you’ve probably noticed a lot of … dolls.

There are dolls all over X and Facebook feeds. Instagram? Dolls. TikTok? You guessed it: dolls, plus tutorials on how to make dolls. There are even dolls all over LinkedIn, arguably the most serious and least fun member of the gang.

You can call it the Barbie AI treatment or the Barbie box trend. Or if Barbie isn’t your thing, you can go with AI action figures, action figure starter pack, or the ChatGPT action figures trend. But however you hashtag it, the dolls are seemingly everywhere.

And while they have some similarities (boxes and packaging that mimic Mattel’s Barbie, personality-driven accessories, a plastic-looking smile), they’re all as different as the people posting them, except for one crucial, common feature: They’re not real.

The Congresswoman MTG Starter Kit ✨
If I was a doll!
I love all my accessories, including my Bible and gavel for DOGE Committee chair! pic.twitter.com/2fEWYH1Ubt —@mtgreenee

In the new trend, people are using generative AI tools like ChatGPT to to reimagine themselves as dolls or action figures, complete with accessories. It’s proven quite popular, and not just with influencers.

Celebrities, politicians and major brands have all jumped in. Journalists reporting on the trend have made versions of themselves holding microphones and cameras (though this journalist won’t make you suffer through that). And users have made versions of pretty much any notable figure you can think of, from billionaire Elon Musk to actress and singer Ariana Grande.

Good morning from me, @BenMBoulos & our AI dolls on @BBCBreakfast (Do I really look like that?!)
We’ll be looking at concerns around the trend, plus all your news, weather & sport! pic.twitter.com/mP469K7IEW —@luxmy_g

According to tech media website The Verge, it actually started on professional social networking site LinkedIn, where it was popular with marketers looking for engagement. As a result, many of the dolls you’ll see out there seek to promote a business or hustle. (Think, “social media marketer doll,” or “SEO manager doll.”)

But it’s since leaked over to other platforms, where everyone, it seems, is having a bit of fun finding out if life in plastic really is fantastic. That said, it isn’t necessarily harmless fun, according to several AI experts who spoke to CBC News.

Some of our chapter members have hopped on the AI action figure trend. Meet Ingrid Thomson and Jan-Hendrik du Toit, dedicated Wikimedians helping grow the free knowledge movement, one edit and citation at a time.#wikimediaZA #WikimediaSouthAfrica pic.twitter.com/eYCr4tnBD2 —@Wikimedia_ZA

“It’s still very much the Wild West out there when it comes to generative AI,” said Anatoliy Gruzd, a professor and director of research for the Social Media Lab at Toronto Metropolitan University.

“Most policy and legal frameworks haven’t fully caught up with the innovation, leaving it up to AI companies to determine how they’ll use the personal data you provide.”

Privacy concerns

The popularity of the doll-generating trend isn’t surprising at all from a sociological standpoint, says Matthew Guzdial, an assistant computing science professor at the University of Alberta.

“This is the kind of internet trend we’ve had since we’ve had social media. Maybe it used to be things like a forwarded email or a quiz where you’d share the results,” he told CBC News.

But as with any AI trend, there are some concerns over its data use.

Generative AI in general presents significant data privacy challenges. As the Stanford University Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (Stanford HAI) notes, data privacy issues and the internet aren’t new, but AI is so “data-hungry” that it ramps up the scale of the risk.

“If you’re providing an online system with very personal data about you, like your face or your job or your favourite colour, you ought to do so with the understanding that those data aren’t just useful to get the immediate outcome — like a doll,” said Wendy Wong, a political science professor at the University of British Columbia who studies AI and human rights.

That data will be fed back into the system to help them create future answers, Wong explained.

This photo illustration taken on April 2 shows a woman looking at a Facebook user profile displaying an image generated by artificial intelligence in the style of a Studio Ghibli animation. It became a popular trend online following the release of ChatGPT’s image generator. (AFP via Getty Images)

In addition, there’s concern that “bad actors” can use data scraped online to target people, Stanford HAI notes. In March, for instance, Canada’s Competition Bureau warned of the rise in AI-related fraud.

About two-thirds of Canadians have tried using generative AI tools at least once, according to new research by TMU’s Social Media Lab. But about half of the 1,500 people the researchers sampled had little to no understanding of how these companies collect or store personal data, the report said.

Gruzd, with that lab, suggests caution when using these new apps. But if you do decide to experiment, he suggests looking for an option to opt out of having your data used for training or other third-party purposes under the settings.

“If no such option is available, you might want to reconsider using the app; otherwise, don’t be surprised if your likeness appears in unexpected contexts, such as online ads.”

The environmental and cultural impact of AI

Then there’s the environmental impact. CBC’s Quirks and Quarks has previously reported on how AI systems are an energy-intensive technology with the potential to consume as much electricity as an entire country.

A study out of Cornell University claims that training OpenAI’s GPT-3 language model in Microsoft’s U.S. data centres can directly evaporate 700,000 litres of clean freshwater, for instance. Goldman Sachs has estimated that AI will drive a 160 per cent increase in data centre power demand.

WATCH | AI and its energy demands: Is the AI doll trend hurting the environment? Duration 2:34 There’s a good chance you’ve seen these AI dolls all over your social media feeds. They’re part of a growing artificial intelligence trend that researchers say has real-world consequences.

The average ChatGPT query takes about 10 times more power than a Google search, according to some estimates.

Even OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has expressed concern about the popularity of generating images, writing on X last month that it had to temporarily introduce some limits while it worked to make it more efficient because its graphics processing units were “melting.”

it’s super fun seeing people love images in chatgpt.

but our GPUs are melting.

we are going to temporarily introduce some rate limits while we work on making it more efficient. hopefully won’t be long!

chatgpt free tier will get 3 generations per day soon. —@sama

Meanwhile, as the AI-generated dolls take over our social media feeds, so too is a version being circulated by artists concerned about the devaluation of their work, using the hashtag #StarterPackNoAI.

Concerns had previously been raised about the last AI trend, where users generated images of themselves in the style of the Tokyo animation studio Studio Ghibli — and launched a debate over whether it was stealing the work of human artists.

Despite the concerns, however, Guzdial says these kinds of trends are positive — for the AI companies trying to grow their user bases. These models are extremely expensive to train and keep running, he said, but if enough people use them and become reliant on them, the companies can increase their subscription prices.

“This is why these sorts of trends are so good for these companies that are deeply in the red.”