In the past two decades, the cultural perception of femininity has morphed, flipped and rebranded itself over and over again. I’ve lived through the “pick me” era, the coquette resurgence, the girlboss industrial complex, Barbie feminism and more. Each iteration seems to promise freedom, a shiny new way to define femininity on our own terms. And yet, every version ultimately finds a way to wrap itself around our necks like a silk ribbon: soft, seductive, but still designed to restrict.
Rejecting femininity used to be all the rage. The early 2000s and 2010s gave us the “Cool Girl” who swore off pink, mocked rom-coms and took pride in being “one of the boys.” We thought we were shedding patriarchal expectations, but in reality, we were just embracing a different and equally constraining mold. Then came the girlboss era, when women were told we could have it all, as long as we wore the right blazer and perfected the art of the overbooked Google Calendar. Work twice as hard, but never let them see you sweat. Be a boss, but also a bombshell. Be empowered, but not intimidating.
Today, the pendulum has swung back. Hyper-femininity is in, with pastel aesthetics, bows in our hair and ultra-girly catch phrases like “I’m just a girl” and “girl dinner.” The Brat trend, epitomized by Charli XCX’s 2024 album, Brat, celebrated the messy party-girl archetype, while the coquette fashion trend borrows from Lolita-esque vibes, all lace and longing gazes. At first glance, this revamped traditional femininity seems like a win. We’re reclaiming softness, romanticizing our lives and rejecting the sterile “hustle” culture that exhausted us all. However, when you step back, you start to wonder – are we actually choosing this or are we swapping one set of constraints for another?
One Reddit user, @Badcluesbears, put it best: “The girls are starving for community and clear expectations.” Maybe that is what all of this really comes down to. We want a sense of belonging, a set of rules that tells us we are doing womanhood correctly.
Online discourse is riddled with micro-labels: clean girl, soft girl, tradwife, downtown girl, etc. Womanhood itself is almost like a trend cycle, a product to be rebranded and resold every few years. One minute we are rolling our eyes at the “dumb blonde” trope; the next, we’re romanticizing it in the name of ironic femininity.
Social media algorithms are the real girlboss now, profiting off this endless reinvention and feeding us aesthetics that turn self-expression into performance. It’s more than just cultivating an online persona, with the heightened expectation to actually buy into these trends.
Clothing brands market prairie dresses, and previous hubs for party attire essentials such as PrettyLittleThing, now sell pieces for the tradwives and coquette girls. Amazon shops promote beige storage bins and all-gray loungewear for the clean girls. Even your bedsheets can be part of your “vibe.” The message is incredibly clear: if you want to belong, you better have the wardrobe and skincare routine to prove it.
A subculture might offer community and identity, but each one comes with its own set of unspoken rules. In the ‘90s, the Riot Grrl movement aimed to express feminism through punk rebellion, yet it largely excluded women of color. Additionally, Goth women have long used sexuality as a form of empowerment, but even within their own subculture, there was immense pressure to conform to a hyper-sexualized ideal. No matter the era, the expectation that women must be something (preferably marketable) remains.
What we’re really seeing is the same old story in a different font. The rise, fall and rebirth of femininity trends are evidence of how deeply we seek identity and belonging in a world that keeps repackaging womanhood as a product. The pressure to be something that is easily clickable, legible and sellable, never really fades, no matter if we don pink bows or power suits.
Nevertheless, maybe womanhood isn’t something to be summarized. Maybe it doesn’t fit inside a Pinterest board. At its core, womanhood should be an expansive space to grow into, not a role to play.
We don’t need another trend cycle to tell us who we are. We need to opt out altogether. Instead of asking how to perform femininity “correctly,” we should be asking ourselves why we feel the need to perform it at all. The real rebellion is not the existential choice between “girl boss” and “coquette;” it’s refusing to be defined by trends in the first place. It is time to start defining womanhood on terms that aren’t for sale.
