Every season for the last three years, Sydney-based designer Niamh Galea of Ramp Tramp Tramp Stamp releases pink silk ribbons inscribed with poetry she's written. Fans of the brand wear these ribbons crisscrossed up their legs, looped choker-style around their necks and in bows around their wrists. "They're raw, so they fray; they're really nice," says the designer. The first year she made them, she says they did "pretty well" but took a while to sell out. In 2023, she wasn't able to keep them in stock.
Balletcore has been the most adaptable trend to emerge from the year that was Girlcore™ 2023. Ribbons, laced Shibari-style up bare limbs, strung through corsets, weaved through hair and curved into stiff bows affixed to hair clips, handbags, and earrings have snaked their way down runways and spread through TikTok. They’ve leapt with agility into our shopping baskets, in a cascade of Miu Miu elasticised flats and Reformation special releases. As Galea has experienced, in the last twelve months, a ribbon or a bow is pretty much guaranteed to be a bestseller.
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It's easy to attribute the explosive popularity of balletcore to an overall enthusiasm for all things feminine. But the ballerina and her accessories have held the attention of designers for years.
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Balletcore should have passed its expiry date, but it hasn’t. The answer to why could reside in its commonality with another hyper-feminine trend that's bubbled away for the last five years: dark feminine.
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In 2018 Michael Kors sent jet-setting 70s ballerinas clad in monochromatic cashmere down the runway for his 2019 ready-to-wear collection. Since then, we've seen preppy schoolgirl ballerinas (in the now infamous flats) at Miu Miu, grunge-rave ballerinas at Sandy Liang and Maison Margiela’s spring 2023 ready-to-wear shows, and as recently as Simone Rocha for Jean Paul Gaultier's Spring 2024 collection, delicate bows made of human hair adding a feral whimsy to a collection full of ribbons that dangled like tendrils on hats, corsets and leotards.
In January 2024, TikTokers and fashion journalists haven't tired of announcing "ballet core is trending," and number-crunching Instagram account @databutmakeitfashion says that based on search results, ballet flats and headbands are going nowhere. Last week, Ariana Grande released the song "Yes, And?" featuring the star in a full ballet core cut-out leotard, dancing at the barre; it seems the trend will reach its sixth birthday.
Balletcore should have passed its expiry date, but it hasn’t. The answer to why could reside in its commonality with another hyper-feminine trend that's bubbled away for the last five years: dark feminine. Mother to sub-trends ranging from preppy Wednesday Addams and Sabrina-inspired dark academia to controversial hollow-eyed, Rare-beauty blush-less and leather-heavy succubus chic aesthetic, dark feminine is all about literal witchcraft.
Posts under the "dark feminine" hashtag feature not only makeup tips and moodboards but advice for manipulating men, manifesting power and accumulating material wealth. Examples include Monica Belluci cleansing her face and applying her makeup in the 1991 film “La Riffa”, while an ASMR-esque voiceover repeats, "Looks like you forgot, once again, how powerful you are" with 1.7 million views. Beauty trends like siren eyes promise a stare that will make you irresistible and bend men to your will. Some posts simply feature quite helpful life advice, from setting boundaries (by telling people you're not contactable after 9:30pm) and asking for what you want (rebranded "the whisper method").
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While TikTok's dark feminine might feel like watching an eyeliner-heavy Tony Robbins video, it has taken overtly political expression on the runway. Designer Elena Velez described her 2022 Year in Glass collection as a "shrieking display of female hysteria", a backlash against the "anatomical subjugation" of Roe v Wade. Models with gangrenous-looking nail extensions, oil-slick black lips and dirty hair marched in step, "communing in a magic sorority." Garments made of repurposed materials, many of which in pristine condition would fit the balletcore aesthetic, seemed to be rotting away from greasy limbs.
At Paris Fashion Week, Maria Grazia Chiruri's Spring/Summer 2024 collection for Dior saw the Tumblr-core pigtailed princesses of 2022 all grown up in opulently occult-looking designs. The models looked ready for a meeting of Roald Dahl's Witches.
Chiruri described the collection as a backlash against Monsieur Dior's "New Look", which emphasised the female waist. Instead, it featured long, A-line skirts, pointed black heels, starburst embroidered semi-sheer shift dresses and long, pointed-shouldered satin jackets with embroidery reminiscent of faded tarot cards. Behind the models, a video installation displayed slogans like "Take your hands off when I say no, take your eyes off when I say no."
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In both cinema and ballet culture, injuries inflicted by the pointe shoe are framed as a kind of blood sacrifice, in which physical pain is traded for physical feats as supernatural as any witch's enhancement.
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Franky Ferrer-Best is a PhD researcher and ex-ballerina. She's one of a small number of feminist academics interested in the subversive and positive potential of ballet. She acknowledges while ballet doesn’t have as obvious connection to counterculture as witchcraft, dark and subversive femininities are integral to it. "The seeming oppositionality between balletcore and something like succubus chic is interesting; those darker femme characters are essential to ballet narratives, from Swan Lake to Sleeping Beauty," she tells Refinery29 Australia.
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And of course, there's also the element of blood magic. The most famous ballet accessory is the pointe shoe. While we have it to thank for the far more comfortable trending ballet flat, even a short description sounds horrifying. It features a wooden "box" or plinth on which the ballerina's toes rest for an illusion of supernatural elevation and a "shank" that needs to be beaten into submission by the dancer before being worn, danced into ruins and eventually discarded.
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Ferrer-Best posits that one of the things horror auteurs find disturbing and compelling about the ballerina, is the extent to which they take up space, to the exclusion of men. The most famous ballet films are focused on single women.
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The masochistic ballerina with her blood-soaked pointe shoe has become iconographic, thanks to horror auteurs and authors. In Darren Aranofsky's Black Swan, Natalie Portman’s ballerina on the brink Nina Sayers beats her shoe into shape while tending to her mutilated feet. In Hans Christian Anderson's macabre fairytale The Red Shoes, a pair of bewitched slippers cause a girl to dance herself to death, and on the poster for Dario Argento's 1977 ballet body-horror Suspiria, a naked ballerina is outlined, blood trickling from her neck, down her pointe shoes and pooling over the film’s title.
In both cinema and ballet culture, injuries inflicted by the pointe shoe are framed as a kind of blood sacrifice, in which physical pain is traded for physical feats as supernatural as any witch's enhancement.
Ferrer-Best posits that one of the things horror auteurs find disturbing and compelling about the ballerina, is the extent to which they take up space, to the exclusion of men. The most famous ballet films are focused on single women. In Black Swan, Natalie Portman's sexually repressed, tortured perfectionist Nina leads a monk-like existence, masturbating in her childhood bedroom and harbouring bloodthirsty and erotic fantasies about her female understudy. In 2018, Dakota Johnson took the lead in the remake of Suspiria, portraying a ballerina who joins a ballet company only to discover the academy is run by well-dressed witches, where dancers sacrifice their bodies and souls for their craft. In the body horror heavy production, the only central male character is played by Swinton in prosthetics.
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Lilian Nicol Ford, designer at Australian label Nicol and Ford, notes that it's interesting that women are gravitating to what they refer to as "quite active, almost weaponised characters at this point in history." Particularly compared with the time-focused Y2K and 90s aesthetics that have dominated fashion, and caused consternation.
"This ahistorical fantasy-based aesthetic is potentially resonating with a large group of people because our current trend cycle privileges particular body types,” they explain. The return of the cookie-cutter Paris Hilton silhouette with low-slung jeans, halter tops, and bias-cut slip dresses has coincided with the runway's dwindling size diversity, just as rates of eating disorders have skyrocketed.
Meanwhile, designers like Michaela Stark have made a name for themselves using the accoutrements of balletcore, from corsets to ribbons and pointe shoes, to manipulating bodies in surreal, unrecognisable shapes. Stark has had such an impact that she was recruited by Victoria’s Secret to create a collection as part of their body-positive rebranding.
Body image is far from the only pressure being placed on women over the last three years to make the all-female fantasy worlds of the ballet studio or witches coven feel alluring. Witches have a long association with women's reproductive health. Historically, herbalists who provided cures for women’s ailments were frequently painted as witches, thanks to suspicions that they were providing contraception and abortion, particularly during the Salem witch trials — and the overturning of Roe v Wade has brought these anxieties to life. For women in many states in America, the horror of abortion access being denied is very real. And even for women who aren't directly impacted (like many of us in Australia), the news of "deadlines" and lost battles in other states and countries is a reminder that our control over our bodies is transient.
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Then, of course, there's the impact of reproductive climate anxiety. Most millennials and older Gen Z women and femmes tying ribbons to their hair, searching for dupes of The Row's Ava Mary Janes and reaching for socks they wore as little girls, were raised with the assumption that having a child was a positive milestone (whether or not they actually wanted children). But, in 2024, an apocalyptic addition has been made to women's "panic years". Are you contributing to the climate crisis or even acting inhumanely by bringing a child into this dying world?
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With the weight of so much existential pressure tied to women's bodies, it's unsurprising that people who have a uterus might want to retreat into childhood fantasy spans that are not only removed from reproductive pressures but place emphasis on protective, productive and expressive physical rituals.
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While men are subject to these questions when contemplating children, online discourse and research frequently seem directed at women. One research paper read: "Under current conditions… each child adds about 9441 metric tons of carbon dioxide to the carbon legacy of an average female." There is no indication whether this legacy is split with her partner. A 2023 Canadian study found that women expressed feelings of "anxiety, grief and loss" when prompted to think about child rearing and climate change. Importantly, men contemplating parenthood only need to consider emissions deadlines, not biological ones.
With the weight of so much existential pressure tied to women's bodies, it's unsurprising that people who have a uterus might want to retreat into childhood fantasy figures that are not only removed from reproductive pressures but place emphasis on protective, productive and expressive physical rituals. Whether it's Nina bashing her pointe shoes into shape, the blood magic of Suspiria's witches, the hours of stretching and repeated dance routines found on #ballettok and the spells promising to ward off bad vibes and sadness. One spell reads: “extremely easy protection spell but very strong” — sign us up.
Ferrer-Best says that ballet isn’t pain-free. “For dancers I speak with, pain figures in their daily lives, but they also have a productive and expressive relationship with pain,” she says. In a way, mingling physical and emotional pain with art or magic can feel like a reclamation of power, as does diving back into our dress-up boxes.
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