When Did Fashion Become a Conspiracy?
On how the Internet yearns for hidden agendas in our wardrobes.
If you haven’t heard, the biggest beauty trend for this summer is apparently bare nails. Like many Internet trends, it quickly turned into a heated debate. On one side, you have TikTok influencers declaring bare nails and “princess nails” the new high-status look. On the other is the inevitable backlash, and backlash to the backlash, that now comes with any trend. The whole thing reached a fever pitch with Allure declaring bare nails “girlboss propaganda."
The word “propaganda” is a telling choice, if a hyperbolic one. It reflects a growing mindset that applies the conspiratorial thinking that’s taken over American politics to trend analysis. In this line of thinking, trends are not just a reflection of the larger world, but are shaping it in insidious ways. Tankinis are fascism. Babydoll dresses are pedophilic brainwashing. High necklines are Gilead-core. The bow craze of 2023 made women MAGA. Anything and everything you can think of is a “recession indicator.” It seems no basic design element is safe from political inquiry. As is so often the case, women’s styling choices make a convenient scapegoat for larger anxieties.
To those with even a passing knowledge of fashion history, the discourse can often seem very silly. After all, these styles have long histories, and people across the ideological spectrum enjoy them for a variety of reasons. But these responses are not coming from a place of reason. Our current era is in many ways defined by conspiratorial thinking, with QAnon and the antivax movement gaining real influence over mainstream discourse and policy. The young people who make up the target audience for most fashion and beauty content online reward commentary that reflects this paranoia. Just last month, posts claiming listings on clothing resale site Vinted were a front for human trafficking went so viral it sparked a police investigation. The forces that shape our world feel increasingly inexplicable, and it colors how we see even "frivolous" things like fashion.
Of course, this fashion paranoia is not happening in a vacuum. Public trust in institutions like government writ large, the justice system, and the news media is at an all-time low. Since it seems like the official channels can no longer be trusted, people are taking matters into their own hands, often in deeply unserious, paradoxical ways. If we call out those damn girlbosses doing propaganda for Big Bare Nail, it won’t improve conditions for working women or fix crushing income inequality, but it’s more accountability than anyone doing us real harm seems to be facing right now.
Before bare nails, the most hotly debated trend of the year was the babydoll dress. First sparked by Olivia Rodrigo, the debate over whether the dress "normalizes pedophilia" raged throughout the summer. The name babydoll itself seems to suggest sexy-baby infantilization, but, as Rodrigo's defenders pointed out, it also has a long history as a liberatory and countercultural garment for women.
The style first came to prominence during World War II as a popular fabric-saving style for adult women, and its lineage can be traced through the mods and Jane Birkin in the 1960s, through the riot grrrls of the 1990s, and the soft grunge aesthetic of the 2010s. This is the history Rodrigo is placing herself in. In fact, the video for her single "Drop Dead," which first sparked the controversy, is something of a girlhood-subverting Avengers. The video was directed by Tumblr-era icon Petra Collins, a woman any former art hoe will tell you knows a thing or two about subversive aesthetics of femininity. In addition to the controversial babydoll, Rodrigo also wears one of Birkin's actual dresses. Its primary reference point is the Riot Grrrl movement, and its associated aesthetic, “kinderwhore,” which embraced the babydoll dress as a symbol of messy, complicated girlhood-meets-womanhood in the 1990s.
In an interview with The New York Times Popcast, Rodrigo explained that this was her primary inspiration for the dress, saying: "I didn't think that I looked sexy in that at all. I was like, this is so cool. I feel I look like Kathleen Hanna or Courtney Love, all these people who are my heroes, and I felt cool and comfortable in it. I just think if we start dressing in a way that's like, 'I don't want some fucking freak to think that I'm sexy like a baby' or some crazy thing like that, I think it's losing the plot a little bit."
Frankly, I don’t think this is something she should have to clarify; the references were obvious. But not coincidentally, the “Drop Dead” video dropped just a few months after the release of the Epstein files, a scandal that has in many ways defined the political and cultural mood of the last decade. The scandal has proved that some level of conspiracy is, in fact, true: many of the world’s most powerful people were involved with a secret elite pedophile trafficker. In particular, Epstein's involvement with retail mogul Les Wexner, whose work at mall staples like Victoria's Secret and Bath & Body Works shaped much of the 2000s aesthetic, has been disturbing to many young women who saw those brands as formative. As Constance Grady put it in a piece about Wexner for Vox, “Were we simply watching capitalism in action? Or was it something closer to being groomed?”
If the babydoll dress was controversial for being too sexy, last summer's most discussed trend, the tankini, was problematic for not being sexy enough. According to many TikTok commentators, the trend was “modesty propaganda,” some even going as far as calling it a conservative political statement. A lot of people made the connection to Christian ideals of modesty, but the idea that more skin = feminism is overly simplistic at best, and there are many reasons tankinis have become trendier over the last couple of summers. Tankinis were also popular in the 2000s, which has become an ever-constant source of inspiration for the 2020s. For example, Victoria’s Secret ads from the period show similar styles to the ones trending on TikTok, featuring supermodels like Gisele Bündchen and Adriana Lima. Some women want a more unique style choice than the usual bikini or one-piece. For the plus-size market, they were never even “out.” Others find them more practical for swimming, or just want to enjoy the beach in a less sexualized option. As feminist writer Leora Tanenbaum pointed out in an interview about the debate, the trend is less about Christian purity culture than it is about pushback to the Slut Walk era idea that showing the body is inherently liberating for women: "I see the tankini debate not as much as pressure to look modest, but more as young people saying, 'I am just so sick of being objectified.'”
But the tankini makes an easier and more visible target than the widespread, often nebulous ways we are actually being pushed toward conservatism. The actual Christian right pipelines we encounter every day, like a rogue TikTok about Blake Lively that then leads someone to Candace Owens’ more extreme ideas, or Thiel-funded birth control misinformation disguised as lifestyle content, are often hard to clock. For those who are aware this push is happening but don’t know how to identify real propaganda, shaming the tankini can feel like hitting the enemy back, even if they are really swinging at the air.
In times of uncertainty, moral panics against fashion are not uncommon. During the Great Depression, the cause célèbre was the flapper look, argued to be leading us to ruin, with some schools, banks, and businesses even imposing bans on the look. In 1943, white Americans in Los Angeles attacked Mexicans for wearing suits in the Zoot Suit Riots, making the suit a symbol of ration-wasting and delinquency. During the Vietnam War, it was the unpatriotic “longhairs” who represented the country’s moral decay. In the 1980s, the Satanic Panic targeted subcultural fashions like black lipstick and metal T-shirts. These trends, like the tankinis and babydolls of today, did not cause any concrete harm, but offered people a convenient and visible symbol for societal anger.
That’s not to say fashion trends are above criticism. After all, fashion has never existed in a vacuum, and the global fashion industry has certainly earned its fair share of skepticism. But the fashion conspiracy theorists are confusing cause with effect, and visibility with power. Trends resonate because they reflect the world around us, not because they caused it. Adult women who like babydoll dresses and ruffles are not the ones putting children at risk of abuse. It makes no difference to the CEO trying to replace us all with AI agents if our nails are nude or red. Lashing out at these individual, highly siloed styles can offer, at best, temporary catharsis, but it also allows us to distract ourselves from the harder, less clickbait-able work of identifying and fighting the harmful systems that oppress us. Our reactions to them say less about the thing itself than they do about living in an era where the leadership feels untrustworthy, women’s autonomy feels increasingly fragile, and the future feels out of our control. In a conspiratorial age, even the smallest aesthetic choice starts to feel like evidence.
The other risk of falling into fashion conspiracies is that it limits our own means of self-expression and connection. By policing each other for wearing bare nails, or tankinis, or babydolls, or whatever the next problematic trend is, and assigning those choices a sinister motive, we are deciding that there is a very limited range of acceptable femininity, and anyone who falls outside of it cannot be trusted. Women like Rodrigo who break these unspoken rules have already been subject to mass harassment and unfounded accusations online. Though Rodrigo did not accept the criticism, she has seemingly backed off the babydoll style she once loved a bit, wearing a sweatshirt and T-shirt in her next music video and different silhouettes in recent promotional appearances. This is one thing when we are talking about a major celebrity protected by a PR team, but the messaging trickles down to regular women. It is not at all uncommon to see women accused, in the comments section, of being pick-mes, Karens, or existing for the male gaze, all for basic aesthetic crimes like wearing too much makeup or showing too much, or too little, skin.
In reality, having bare nails has no bearing on whether you are a “girlboss” or not. Maybe a significant amount of people are following the trend hoping to be one, or maybe they just like the look. The Allure article doesn't make a convincing case either way. But by fixating on these outside markers, we close ourselves off to the possibility that someone could be on our side, further alienating ourselves and making us fight over something as inconsequential as a nail color. If we keep looking for hidden ideologies in every aesthetic choice, we’ll end up policing each other far more effectively than any girlboss ever could. 🌀
Casey Greene is a writer and pr girl based in L.A. You can find her writing about fashion, film, internet culture, and more at her Substack @fashionvictims.
