Y2K, coquette, VSCO, pilates princess, grunge: In today’s modern fashion landscape, the trend cycle ensures the constant consumption of a wide variety of aesthetics. All these trends, though, are associated with a specific body type—making them inherently exclusionary and detrimental to many women’s mental health.
The style of Y2K is best known for pieces that reveal one’s midriff, most notably low-rise jeans. The fashion industry used these styles to fuel an obsession with an unhealthily skinny physique enforced by a diet culture encouraging extreme weight loss.
High-waisted mom jeans, marketed as body-positive, became more prominent beginning in the mid-2010s. While the mom-jean’s high waist hid the wearer’s stomach, it still emphasized a thin waist through the hourglass silhouette. The trend of being skinny never went away—it just shifted.
The trend of being skinny never went away—it just shifted.
Regardless of attempts to relegate unhealthy body standards to the past, no single era is a monolith in the commodification of women’s bodies. Due to the cultural emphasis on their appearance, women constantly face an extreme amount of pressure to fit a certain look.
A recent trend, Pink Pilates Princess, embraces wearing pink, Y2K-esque clothing and going to Pilates. This trend has tied women’s bodies to a clothing style by encouraging women to take Pilates classes to obtain a toned physique with washboard abs all while wearing pink and yoga pants.
Another clothing trend that ties one’s body to a hyper-feminine clothing style is the “coquette” aesthetic, defined by wearing lace, bows, frills, and the color pink. Yet despite its innocent exterior, participants of the coquette aesthetic often only support light-skinned, thin women. Some women who participate in the coquette aesthetic also have ties to pro-anorexia social media pages; On Reddit, Twitter, and Tumblr, these “coquette” accounts encourage women to count their calories to be thin and frail.
Even trends that don’t emphasize being thin still make women feel like they need to conform to a certain body type. In 2014, Kim Kardashian—who got a BBL and made curvy clothing mainstream—said, “I feel proud if young girls look up to me and say, ‘I’m curvy, and I’m proud of it now.” Kardashian’s curvy body was so iconic that when she wore an all-black body suit to the 2021 Met Gala, she was instantly recognizable—the clothing wasn’t the fashion statement, it was simply just her body.
Even trends that don’t emphasize being thin still make women feel like they need to conform to a certain body type.
It is certainly okay for people to love indulging in aesthetics. However, this becomes problematic when we link specific body types with different aesthetics. Instead, all body types should be seen and embraced within an aesthetic. Many currently popular aesthetics fail to do this because they tie a specific body type to a style.
Brandy Melville, a popular clothing store for teenagers, intentionally designs small clothing and then markets it as “one size fits all”—recently changed to “one size fits most.” This feeds into the message that clothes shouldn’t fit women, women should fit their clothes—all masked behind the language of inclusivity.
Under the expectations imposed on her, a woman is faced with an impossible choice: try to keep up with the latest trends, and their body standards, and inevitably fail, or choose to ignore societal pressures and be ostracized.
Because large corporations exploit their insecurities, women spend excessive amounts of money on their appearance. Despite earning 16% less than men on average according to Forbes, women still spend 16% more than men on clothing, depleting their already disproportionate funds.
The fashion industry has tied body image and fashion together by creating a body standard and emphasizing the value of appealing to it using clothing. When we celebrate the twig-thin bodies of runway models, we send a message: a woman’s worth is defined by visual appeal and this appeal should be commodified.
Trends and aesthetics should not require or be associated with specific body types. For your body and your bank account, wear what brings you joy. To heal our relationship with fashion, we need to heal our relationships with our bodies.
