Girlhood, deconstructed: Last year it was Barbie pink. This year it’s BRAT green. Join as we untangle the evolution of “girlhood.” (Yes, Simone Rocha sneakers, Girls reruns, and Sandy Liang’s pink ribbons included.)
“End of last year, I had so many people ask me, like, ‘How do you define coquettecore.’ And I was like, ‘What?’” the 37-year-old designer Simone Rocha says with a laugh, speaking to me over Zoom from her London studio. Coquettecore, cottagecore, girlhood — these internet labels, all a decade younger than Rocha’s eponymous clothing line, have glommed onto her work all the same. Rocha is unfazed. “I feel more hardcore than girlcore. Like, ‘hardcore femininity’ — that’s probably more how I’d describe it. Still, I’m not on TikTok, but I have seen these girls being like ‘how to dress like a Simone Rocha girl’ or ‘how to make things like Simone Rocha.’ It’s kind of amazing.”
“So, why do people apply the term ‘girlhood’ to your work?” I ask.
“I dunno!” she laughs. “When you say ‘girlhood’ I think of The Virgin Suicides. It’s very nostalgic, but it’s not my childhood. It’s about being part of a procession. Idealism. The female gaze. It’s very complex. My body of work isn’t defined by ‘girlhood,’ but discussing femininity and the physicality of [it] is a big part. I’m attracted to [girlhood], but it wouldn’t be the one thing that defines my label.”
You remember girlhood, right? Summer 2023 was the locus for a particular strain of it that conquered culture, driven by a coincidental confluence of quintessentially femme factors across many mediums: the Barbie movie, Sandy Liang’s pink Salomon sneakers, rising demand for ballet flats, many trending aesthetics like balletcore, and many more memetic girl activities, from girl math to girl dinner. Girl gone wild. Little wonder we exist not in a “woman’s world” but in “the year of the girl,” ongoing and tethered between girlhoods real and imagined.
“That’s why this year of girlhood felt so powerful for so many,” said writer Amanda Shapiro in a 2023 article for Highsnobiety. “By the time they’ve fully entered adulthood, women have buried their girl selves so deeply it can be painful to dig them up. But the nostalgia, the yearning for who they once were, remains.”
The past, as always, informs the present.
A year later, girlhood is an established aesthetic to be embraced, streamed, collected, and worn. Especially worn: As its staying power has solidified, girlhood’s wearable side has evolved into perhaps its most crucial factor. Girlhood aligns with music, TV miniseries, and even scented candles, but it is arguably, first, visually defined by clothing and accessories.
Though “girlhood” garments do sometimes encompass the tropes typically associated with the term — ribbons, bows, and everything pink — they’re more importantly shaped by the eye of the beholder. The Hydro Flasks of VSCO girls and the nap dresses of coastal grandmas are merely new-gen wrinkles in an age-old girlhood cloth patched together with interwoven cultural signifiers. Girlhood fashion is as wildly disparate as, well, girls. The Mount Rushmore of girlhood thus encompasses everything including the street-ready girlcore of Sandy Liang; the grownup sass of Miuccia Prada’s Miu Miu; the darkly ironic ’90s streetwear kitsch of Praying; and the knowingly gauche Y2K overload of Nicola Brognano’s Blumarine. And then there’s the ornate, elegant femininity of Simone Rocha.
Rocha’s needlework embroidery, lace-y textiles, pearlescent Crocs, and signature XXXL bows epitomized a kind of girlhood aesthetic long before it was a documented trend or marketable buzzword. Or, rather, she codified cues that, in hindsight, incidentally fleshed out an aesthetic that came long after. Only by 2023 were critics recognizing the contemporary girlhood movement, but don’t call it a comeback: Rocha has been here for years. Even in her first collections circa 2015, Rocha was refining a vision of baroque femininity that’d come to sum up her genre-flaunting brand of High-Girlishness. Examples of powerful prescience bloomed each season, from the doily dresses and floral gowns of Rocha’s Spring/Summer 2018 line to the satin drapery and balloon skirts of Fall/Winter 2020. She was doing cottagecore many, many months before it even existed.
An entire year before Barbie painted the world pink, Rocha’s SS22 offering presented models in exquisite adaptations of communion dress. The show notes, presumably written by Rocha herself, evoke the atmosphere: “Daughters / Sleep walking, mothering / Communion dress, embellished breast, distressed … Found things and foundlings / Baby teeth & lack of sleep.”
Sounds delicate, pretty, Rococo, even. But Rocha described the emotions fueling that collection as “intense… really intense.”
All that feeling doesn’t fit neatly into the contemporary construct we call “girlhood.” Rocha is personally wary of the term, which makes sense. Like so many trendy catchalls, “girlhood” or “girlcore” can have a flattening effect, reducing the multitudes they’re meant to contain. But though she isn’t keen on singularly representing the notion of girlhood, Rocha also doesn’t reject the label or object to playing along. In 2022, she even curated a women-only art show called “girls girls girls,” its title lowercase and grammar-free because Rocha is actually, unsurprisingly, adept at tapping the girlhood vein. “The word [girlhood] feels nostalgic and natural, something I’ve always been looking at. It’s an emotiveness, almost like a secret in some of the garments. And the emotions that go into each collection, the teasing, the laughing, the crying, the love –– if those things go into the garment, it doesn’t really have an age. From girl to woman, we’re emotional the whole way through,” she laughs.
And, perhaps because the aesthetic was only retroactively applied to her label, Rocha is utterly unafraid of girlhood losing its contemporary edge, potentially undermining the designers that epitomize its trappings. “Things go in and out. That is fashion. It is a mirror of ourselves,” Rocha says. “But there’s always gonna be somebody who connects to it. And it’s not like girls are ever going to be gone,” she adds, throwing her hands up in mock apology. “Like, ‘Sorry! This season, all emotion is gone.’”
