The oyster dress is a high fashion gown created by British fashion designer Alexander McQueen for his Spring/Summer 2003 collection Irere. McQueen's design is a one-shouldered dress in bias-cut beige silk chiffon with a boned upper body and a full-length skirt consisting of hundreds of individual circles of organza sewn in dense layers to the base fabric, resembling the outside of an oyster shell. According to McQueen, the gown took a month's work for three people, who cut and assembled all the pieces individually. In addition to the original beige dress, a version with a red bodice and the ruffled skirt in rainbow colours was also created. The beige and red versions appeared in the Irere runway show, and were photographed for magazines to promote the collection.
The dress originated as a reinterpretation of the "shellfish dress" designed by John Galliano in 1987, which McQueen had long admired and sought to emulate. Contemporary critical response to McQueen's oyster dress was positive. It has become known as the most significant design from Irere, and is considered an iconic piece of McQueen's work, surpassing the famed Galliano original. Only two copies are known to exist, one held by the Metropolitan Museum of Art (the Met) in New York City and one by media personality Kim Kardashian. The Met's copy has appeared in several exhibitions, particularly the retrospective Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty. McQueen returned to the oyster dress concept several times over his career, most prominently in his Autumn/Winter 2006 collection The Widows of Culloden.