The other day I received a parcel in the post, and when I opened it, I squealed with pure glee. Nestled in the box was a pair of pink satin shoes, flat like ballet pumps, fastened with a silver buckle. They looked like a cross between a pair of Velma-from-Scooby-Doo Mary Janes and something you’d see on a Sylvanian Families rabbit. I was delighted.
Over the last couple of months, I’ve developed a predilection for adorning myself in the trappings of uber-femininity: tartan kilts, danceresque tights, legwarmers and fuzzy knits. On the secondhand clothing app Vinted, I now have an alert set up for the phrase “bow jumper”; and there is a container on my dressing table that is overflowing with hair ribbons.
You may be surprised to hear that I am not, in fact, a teenager training at a tough-but-ultimately-character-building ballet school. I am almost 30 and I live in a one-bedroom flat in Peckham. But the frilled collars and padded alice bands I like so much are now all over the high street – go into any H&M or Zara store and you are guaranteed to be confronted by pastel blue and pink sweaters, wraparound cardigans and a sea of crushed velvet – having trickled down from the fashion week runways of Simone Rocha, the New York designer Sandy Liang and, to an extent, Miu Miu’s recent focus on buttoned-up knitwear and dark hosiery.
A lot has been made of fashion’s “return to girlhood”. Some have called it regressive and anti-feminist, but to me, equating outward femininity with frivolity and infantilisation feels flippant. On a recent episode of the fashion and culture show The Polyester Podcast the hosts, Ione Gamble and Gina Tonic, pointed towards “Tumblr feminism” – a strain of online feminism that was prevalent in the early 2010s and intrinsic to the fourth wave – as a possible precursor to the current prevalence of highly feminine fashion.
One of the major tenets of Tumblr feminism was that an enjoyment of “girly” interests and aesthetics did not make one an unserious person, and also that topics that may have been coded in this way – such as pop music and reality TV – were worthy of proper critique. As we see all around us, this point of view (which now feels obvious and widely accepted) was formative for an entire generation of women, and as such feels relevant to fashion’s current bow-obsessed bent.
Tumblr – as well as anime and manga cartoons and comics before it – was also part of the cross-cultural dissemination of kawaii aesthetics (kawaii translates as cute in Japanese, and encompasses things like Hello Kitty and sailor cosplay). Over the last 15 years, east Asian culture has only become more enmeshed in European and US pop culture, thanks in part to the rise of K-pop and its associated stars. It’s no wonder, then, that these styles, rooted as they are in kawaii culture and brought on to runways by young Asian designers (Rocha is Chinese and Irish while Liang is Chinese American), appeal to millennial and gen Z women in the UK.
While it might be an overgeneralisation to reduce everything that happens to young people to economic precarity, I do wonder if it also plays a role here. In my own life, there is a sense that if in adulthood I have to live like an overgrown teen – from the indignities that come with renting, such as not being allowed to hang pictures on the wall or having to consider whether I will ever be financially stable enough to have children – then why shouldn’t I have some fun with what I wear?
The rise of this style could also be a backlash against a tendency towards highly practical trends in millennial fashion. It’s cool, for example, to wear Carhartt work pants to your desk job as you sit and tap at a computer, while Salomon hiking trainers abound among people whose most outdoorsy activity is vaping outside the pub. By contrast, the delicate look of a satin shoe or a soft pair of grey socks feels like an embrace of clothes for their own sake, and of style for fun and joy rather than pure functionality.
In a recent New York Times interview, Sandy Liang, the pioneering designer of the bows ’n’ ribbons trend, said: “I’m obsessed over something that I can actually never return to,” hitting on the way nostalgia – which dominates popular culture in everything from television to music – can preoccupy us with pasts that we ourselves did not always occupy, but perhaps privately longed for.
My own interest in cutesy clothing certainly feels like a little bit of wish-fulfilment – a hand back through the years to a self-conscious, younger me. Sometimes a bow is just a bow, of course. But sometimes it’s a symbol, in which multiple meanings and tensions, both ironic and sincere, are contained.
Lauren O’Neill is a culture writer
