Looking over some new apartments near me online, I’m struck by how everything is grey, with literally less color than the Borg cubes from “Star Trek: The Next Generation”, and how old and stale that aesthetic is, along with the 2010s fashion for them to be inhabited by brunettes with big butts wearing neutral-colored casual clothes. It’s all so played out already. What replaces it?
Above: an actual frame from “Q Who”. I’m not kidding about the Borg cube thing…
I can’t help but hope that the human spirit will be so offended deep down by living in a world without color, to the extent that the “fashionable” aesthetic has barely more color than the realm of the spooks in “Halloweentown II: Kalabar’s Revenge” when it was under an evil spell (just think: the ultimate aesthetic horror imaginable in 2001 is now our daily reality in 2023…), that the backlash when it comes by the end of this decade of the 2020s will be so hard as to qualify as brutal.
Come to think of it, it might actually be worse than “Kalabar’s Revenge”… 😮
Think a sudden turn away from grey houses toward everything being in bright vivid colors, as much as a television show from the 1960s was.
“Star Trek: The Original Series” is a fine example. Here’s a screenshot from “Spock’s Brain”. Even the dumb-as-a-box-of-rocks Eymorg had enough sense not to go greige…
Think bright yellow kitchens, vivid red living rooms, bedrooms clad in deep blues and greens, all the furniture looking as rainbow-hued as a color wheel at the paint store, with nary a grey object or a neutral color in sight except perhaps as an accent here and there.
That goes for the inhabitants of these houses as well. For a long time the Instagram-worthy aesthetic has been neutral clothes; with the coming backlash of color the whites, greys, blacks, and beiges will be tossed out of girls’ closets in favor of bright, vivid, feminine colors. Blues as deep as a Colorado sky? Reds as vivid as the goddess of Valentine’s Day? Golds as strong as the sunrise rays themselves? Greens as lush as the awakening of the spring? All that and more could be coming into your favorite Instagram models’ wardrobes, and sooner than you think.
In stark contrast to the grey spell from “Kalabar’s Revenge” or even the subdued palette of the Borg, brunette manes and big butts have timeless appeal. But fashion in hair colors, hair textures, and figure types always cycles between different variants of luscious manes and hourglass figures, and the standard-issue “long straight brunette hair and big butt” aesthetic that’s dominated the Instagram model look, and fashion in general, has been considered stylish for over a decade: that’s a long time for such a trend to endure. So long that history suggests the wheel might be about to turn.
Where will it turn toward? There was a recent boomlet in slim figures and weight loss among celebrity types, but the skyrocketing obesity rates of the pandemic era drove that trend as (in keeping with what fashion often does) a form of backlash from the elites to differentiate themselves from the masses; if the stick-thin figures of the heroin chic era were going to make a comeback, they probably would have done so already.
Fundamentals of physical attraction also militate against anything other than some variant of an hourglass figure becoming fashionable; yes, it can happen, but it swims against the grain, and like I say, the pandemic era shows that any such force of fashion strong enough to overcome that grain just isn’t in the cards in the current or near-future environment.
No, my guess is after big butts fall out of style big breasts will make a big comeback. Men always adore ample breasts on women, making the appeal of the look timeless, always ripe to come back in style after it’s gone out of fashion, and it’s been a while since busty figures were truly fashionable: probably something like 20 years, if not longer. Which makes it extra ripe to come back.
Helping matters is how breast augmentation technology and technique have, almost under-the-radar, advanced substantially since the Kardashian big-butt look became hegemonic on Instagram. These aren’t your grandmother’s breast implants: modern ones look more aesthetically appealing and more natural than ever before. Trendsetters may well start to appear with more generous busts (of artificial origin, sotto voce), and wow fashion followers with how great they look, catapulting the top-heavy hourglass figure into the pinnacle of fashion for the rest of the 2020s and into the 2030s.
The long straight brunette manes that have been ubiquitous on Instagram are also starting to get stale, and, worse yet, are part and parcel of the grey-beige-neutrals aesthetic; brown, after all, is not a very vivid color. What is, among the common hair colors? Blonde, that’s what; the golden hues of a flaxen-haired beauty fit together like a watch with the backlash of color that will take place in the interior environment. Red might be another possibility, but red hair dye just doesn’t quite make it, and in any case is perennially less popular than blonde. So my guess is blonde (though that wouldn’t exclude strawberry blonde having its day in the sun…).
It helps even more that it’s also been about 20 years since platinum blonde hair was truly fashionable, making it ripe to make a big comeback for that reason alone. Fundamentals suggest long hair will stay fashionable. Perhaps instead of the dirty-blonde ombré look that’s predominated among dye-lovers, we’ll see them shift blonder, toward a severe and totally platinum shade for their entire manes, much like the original crop of platinum-blonde starlets from early 1930s Hollywood, who dyed their hair so much it practically turned a platinum white!
Straight hair has been the height of style for a while now, and it too is getting old as a trend, ripe for backlash. To some extent we’re already seeing that (for better or for worse) in the form of the “zoomer perm”. Might we see waves and severe curls make a comeback, the likes of which we haven’t truly seen since the 1980s?
I might go so far as to say that the straight manes of 2010s grey-house inhabitants paralleled the “minimalist” trend of the period; clean, straight lines in grey environments do harmonize well with straight brown (or black) hair, so if people are in the mood for more ornate interior decoration, fancier clothes, and, above all, bright vivid colors, they may well gravitate toward wavy to super-curly platinum-blonde hair; it’s the fanciest and most colorful of all the natural colors and textures.
So if you want to be part of the future of fashion, clad your house in ornate decorations and bright vivid colors everywhere, and clad yourself in fancy clothes, also in bright vivid colors. Dye your hair platinum blonde and get it waved up (or, better yet, curled up). And, if you’re a girl, forget about checking into the gym for those butt-building exercises: check into the best cosmetic surgeon’s office you can find and get those breasts plumped up to generous proportions. Looksmax like that, and you just might be seen as not only beautiful, but a fashion-forward trendsetter as 2030 draws nearer.
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