Balletcore was everywhere last year and is still prominent this year. About Hailey Bieber’s beauty routine on TikTok (the model shared with the world how she achieved her famous ballerina bump and the makeup to match) runway Chanel, Erdem, Molly Goddard and Jean-Paul Gaultier. Of course, ballerinas are back, but tulle skirts, pastel colors, satin items and tight bodysuits are suddenly popular again. However, the trend goes further than this. Balletcore is not only about sweet romance, it also creates dangerous ideals of beauty. Because – as is often the case with leading fashion trends – this “aesthetic” involves ideal images of fashion, hair and makeup, but also an unrealistic ideal of what our bodies should look like.
The “ballet piece” leads to a worrying development
Below contagious titled the ‘ballet body’, the ideal image changes from round shapes (which led to the rise in popularity of BBL a few years ago) to a ‘naturally’ fit and athletic physique with longer and ‘leaner’ muscles and smaller breasts. In plastic surgery clinics, the “ballet body” is a well-known (read: requested) concept, according to the American Society of Plastic Surgeons (ASPS) 2023 Statistics Report, which includes data from 2023. Zoe’s report refers to. Add to this the sudden popularity of drugs like Ozempic and Mounjaro, and there is a clear development.
The worrying aspect of this development is not so much that we strive for a fit and athletic body ideal, but that the physical ideals follow each other in close succession and are at the same time so far apart. When fashion goes beyond what we can easily adjust (like our clothes and hairstyles), this inevitably leads to confusion, insecurity and feelings of powerlessness. Are you blessed with naturally round shapes or a frame that fulfills the characteristics of a “ballet body”? Then it must feel painful to have something as “own” as your body first embrace, but then suddenly “out of fashion”.
Physical ideals are timeless, but the fact that the extremes follow each other so quickly is relatively new. A dangerous recipe for happiness and well-being where it is wise to set limits on the extent to which we allow these types of tendencies to take us away. At the end of the day, plastic surgery should be about building confidence, but how can that be if it’s subject to trends? A tricky point to be careful about.