The Not-So-Hidden Subversiveness of Girly-Girl Style

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Girly style, it seems, is everywhere. It’s been done online, with aesthetic communities like cottagecore and coquette leading the cause, as well as on runways, with designers such as Simone Rocha and Sandy Liang at the helm and more and more brands following suit. While styles of the 2010s were focused on being “not like other girls” through eating pizza and dressing indie sleaze, recent trends have been doing just the opposite: embracing girliness with all of its pink, ruffles and lace. 

This return to girlhood in the fashion space might at first be discounted as nothing but a blip in the larger trend landscape, doomed to carry cheap, pink clothing into landfills en masse, bows and all. But beneath its driving of consumer culture, there is a well of nostalgia, as women participating in these trends seek to subvert popular expectations of what it means to transition from girlhood into womanhood - reclaiming something that many of us lost way too soon. 

The sexualisation of female youth - and by consequence, the sexualisation of young women has long been present in mainstream Western culture and beyond. Tropes such as the sexy schoolgirl in everything from Japanese animes to the American Apparel ads of the 2010s, as well as beauty standards that continue to praise a youth-centered, slim, hairless ideal, push girls into a sexualised landscape, and therefore womanhood, from a much younger age than our gender counterparts.

A study conducted between Cornell University and advocacy group iHollaBack found that 84% of girls had been catcalled by men by the time they reached 17. Of those, 13% were harassed by the time they reached age 10. Multiple recent studies have also indicated that there is an ongoing mental health crisis among specifically teenage girls, owing not only to the impacts of the pandemic and academic stress, but also, significantly, to sexualisation and societal standards for how they should look. 

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What’s more, across several generations, girls in our culture have been brought up with double standards as regards our intelligence, abilities, and future potential. In this way, for many, embracing girlhood at one point was a place of childhood nostalgia, but also a trap to try and escape from. Then girls who have been sexualised at a young age become women who are told that they must try and look younger to remain sexy. The dichotomy causes despair.

Enter the “not like the girls” trope of the 2010s. If girlhood was something so tied to insecurity about looks, and limitations on what you could do, then why not decry it at all costs? Under this line of thought, the trend many of us subscribed to at the time becomes less about trying to impress boys and more about trying to distance ourselves from the trauma that being a girl can bring.

Similar logic held to past “girly” styles for adult women, which were often curated for male audiences, rather than by women hoping to subvert or reclaim something lost. Playboy founder Hugh Hefner, for example, was notorious for peddling a youthful look in his magazine and among his personal playmates. 

“When he invented the concept of a playmate in the 50s, he wanted the women to look very young and fresh faced,” former playmate and reality star Holly Madison said on the Ahead Of The Curve podcast, adding that he found the popular styles of the time too sophisticated and mature, comparing them to “someone’s older sister”. His preferences impacted her personal styling choices; such as Hefner’s insistence that Holly and the other women of the Playboy mansion not wear red lipstick. “To him it was like an older, mature woman, and it wasn’t like the barely legal thing anymore,” she explained. 

“Rather than trying to look youthful and sexy for men, or being produced by men themselves, the girly styles of today focus much less on desirability, and much more on sentiment.”

But rather than trying to look youthful and sexy for men, or being produced by men themselves, the girly styles of today focus much less on desirability, and much more on sentiment. Sandy Liang, whose recent show at New York Fashion Week and viral collaboration with BAGGU resulted in a rapid upshoot in popularity, draws inspiration from a place of nostalgia for her own girlhood. Liang’s designs frequently incorporate childhood motifs such as large bows, pastel colors, and peter pan collars; a sort of vintage idyllic childhood transposed onto the modern-day life of Liang and her cult following. 

In spite of her explosion in popularity, Liang was far from the only one to present reflections on girlhood on this year’s fashion week runways. Selkie, a fantasy-oriented brand known for its large, poofy dresses, chose to take inspiration from 1920s cabaret and put on an inclusive burlesque performance for its S/S 24 show, which was lauded across social media as being designed for the female gaze. Aside from the show's unabashed girlishness, with long pink gowns, fairy wings designed in collaboration with Stoneheart Jewellery, and extravagant floral headpieces, it was also incredibly inclusive in terms of body types, race, and physical ability. Rather than past iterations of girly style which relied on a specific body type, like the ideal body of the 60s youth craze to the arguably even more exclusive look of the playmates, the Selkie runway extended its particular brand of girliness to all women. 

For some women, who can remember the early-2000s plus size section, meme’d multiple times online for its adoration of cold shoulders and weird graphics, this specific nostalgia for girlhood allows the fat customer a chance of embracing a girliness they couldn’t access in their own childhoods. The trend of reclaiming our youths is no longer exclusive to a set few, but to anyone who wishes to participate in it, undoubtedly another driving factor behind its popularity. 

The 2020s iterations of feminine dress are focused solely on the female gaze, harnessing nostalgia to ensure this generation of young women don’t suffer the horrors that the 2010 male gaze put our bodies, our perceptions of self and our perceptions of femininity through.

Words: Katarzyna Maria Skiba