bonjour ballet-core 🩰🦢
ballet-core is back baby
by Megan Collins
Two Christmases ago I started craving leg warmers. My calves weren’t particularly cold, I just thought it would be a fun vibe for the après ski looks I was planning. I scrolled high and low but couldn’t find any cute enough as they were only in stock with brands that catered to dancers (who apparently DO have cold calves and care about function more than fashion.) After briefly toying with the idea of knitting my own (yeah right) I gave up and resigned myself to waiting. Now that moment is here.
Ballet-core is officially back.
I’ll leave it to the Vogues and Mandys of the world to lend their expertise to explain the fashion, artistry, and brands-to-watch of it all. Today, I wanted to unpack a macro theme around embracing effortful softness. Specifically, developing a new appreciation for the way women especially must work incredibly hard to make everything look weightless, effortless, and graceful.
As a forecaster, here’s how I expect today’s modern sensibilities to dance with and inform the current ballet core wave…
Ballet Grunge: Ballet-core is part of a larger macro shift that’s re-examining that which is associated with the feminine (and therefore often written off) and reimagining it through a female gaze that takes it seriously. For current generations of women, ballet (or dance class generally) was a site of stark and clear gender conditioning revolving around the “right” way to express femininity. Now this will be reclaimed as a site to reimagine representations of “femininity.”
Modern Ballerinas: As The Ballerina is put on a cultural pedestal, “real” ballerinas will double down on what differentiates them from the “aesthetic” of a ballerina and subvert it. For example, if they want to highlight the strength and effort they put into their craft I suspect we’ll be seeing more clothing that shows off muscle tone, emphasizes posture, and responds with movement. Plus expect merchandise from elite IYKYK ballet brands and institutions to suddenly be super relevant.
Redefining Ballet Bodies: Notoriously stringent aesthetic standards are a defining characteristic of ballet. However, expect modern gender fluidity and concerted efforts to stop policing women’s bodies to open up the aperture for who we see represented in the space. As I was searching for imagery to research and accompany this post, I could hardly find anyone older, Black, fat, or gender non-conforming. This is a huge opportunity for brands.
TL;DR: As culture highlights and revisits the relevance of Ballet through aesthetics, many will take this moment to reimagine a ballet aesthetic that doesn’t revolve around thin, white, young, female bodies AND can have a bit of an edge.
For more on how this aesthetic is manifesting check out my Pinterest board. (complete with subcategories because i’m a virgo.)
