In a world that has long equated femininity with fragility and softness with submission, a quiet revolution is taking place. It is wearing bows, florals, and unapologetically pink. In 2025, the aesthetic once mocked as “girly” is no longer a marker of passivity. It is power. It is protest. And it is personal. From the runways of Paris to the scrolls of TikTok, a new generation is reclaiming what “pretty” means, refusing to tone it down in order to be taken seriously. The rise of hyper-feminine fashion is not just a trend. It is a response to decades of being told that strength must look like structure, minimalism, or androgyny. This time, it looks like lace.
The Coquette Rebellion
Nowhere is this cultural shift more visible than in the explosion of the coquette aesthetic. With its love of ribbons, frills, ballet flats and vintage perfume bottles, coquettecore is as sugar sweet as it is subversive. On the surface, it is all blush pink and pearl chokers. Beneath the frills lies something far more meaningful: autonomy. Coquette fashion reclaims visual language that was once belittled. It refuses the binary that suggests power dressing must be masculine. It declares that softness is a choice, not a weakness.
Designers Leading the Shift
Designers like Simone Rocha have long championed ultra-feminine silhouettes, from puffed sleeves to tulle dresses and floral embroidery. But in Rocha’s hands, these are not delicate ornaments. They are armour. Her work challenges the traditional notion that to be feminine is to be fragile. Instead, it asks what if gentleness is a strength.
Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons also continue to reshape the language of femininity through design. Their Fall 2025 collection for Prada reimagined classic feminine codes such as black cocktail dresses, rosettes and soft tailoring, turning them into powerful visual statements. In a time when the world feels uncertain, revisiting these silhouettes feels less like nostalgia and more like quiet resistance.
The designers stated that they wanted to question how femininity and beauty are defined. The collection presented a mix of traditionally polished elements such as structured handbags, pointed pumps and full skirts alongside undone styling like tousled hair, oversized sweatshirts and loungewear-inspired pieces. This contrast posed a deeper question: how much of femininity is tied to looking presentable, and who decides what that presentation should be?
These designers are not simply producing clothes. They are using fashion as a form of dialogue, offering thoughtful and subversive interpretations of what it means to dress as a woman today, not to appeal to the male gaze but to reflect the complexity of womanhood itself.
Girlhood as Cultural Currency
Prada FW25
This movement is not just about fabric. It is about identity. Across social media, girlhood is trending again. From hot girl walks to girl dinners and girlcore playlists, there is a resurgence of content that romanticises everyday femininity. This is not a return to the infantilisation of women. It is a reclamation. As Her Campus notes, girlhood in 2025 is not only thriving, but also influential. And this time, it exists on women’s own terms. To indulge in softness, to romanticise your life, to embrace emotion, these are radical acts in a world that has long demanded toughness from women in order to be heard.
The Power of Pink
Valentino PP Pink Collection for F/W22
Perhaps no symbol encapsulates this cultural recalibration better than the colour pink. Once weaponised to trivialise women, pink has now been reclaimed. From the Valentino PP Pink era to the rise of the pink Pilates princess, the colour has become a badge of confidence and refusal. A refusal to dress down, to quieten one’s aesthetic, or to apologise for loving what is beautiful.
Femininity as Resistance
Simone Rocha SS24
The true politics of pretty lie in its contradiction. In reclaiming the very things society told us to outgrow, the bows, the blush, the softness, women are building new forms of resistance. Femininity is no longer something to overcome on the way to empowerment. It is the empowerment. To be feminine in 2025 is to be complex. It is to be strong, soft, ambitious, tender, resilient and expressive. It is to defy a culture that once said you had to choose. In a society that often confuses loudness for power and stillness for weakness, there is something empowering about choosing to be yourself. Being strong and looking pretty while doing it.
