Samuel 2025 Is the Year of the Tomboy
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The Girl has grown up, the age of girlhood is over. In its place rears the head of something new, the age of the Tomboy.
I have recently been on Pinterest looking up vintage neckties like my life depends on it. So many actresses, from Elle Fanning and Ayo Edebiri to Brooke Shields and Kelly Ripa, are wearing suits to their big red carpets. Artists like boygenius and Doechii are performing with in plays on classic old school rockstar fits and uniforms.
This idea has been on my mind for a while. The tomboy has always been part of my own self-concept, but I think that sometimes people misunderstand tomboys as being uninterested in fashion or as rejecting any concept of “personal style” because the idea is girly or something. But it’s like, no, babe. We’re dressing like boys on purpose.
But then last fall, I opened TikTok and a video from one of my fave fashion creators, Dara Allen popped up on my For You Page, and I will alway stop to listen to her wisdom. She posted a video posing in a hoodie, a leather jacket, and a pair of blue jeans. “The chicest, most stylish women of all time have always kind of been tomboyish,” she said in a reply to that video. “That Jane Birkin effect? It’s so chic when a girl looks like a boy, and I’ve always always felt this, and I’ve always connected with that gamine, boyish, impish, mischievous type of style.”
She further expanded on her point of view of tomboy style as a fashion stylist and editor, as well as a trans woman. “I find it so frustrating that the dolls are not afforded the luxury of playing in that wheelhouse and using that language of fashion. I was just so sick of that because it feels like such a natural inclination of mine. So one must be the change they want to see in the world. So while it’s not for all, it’s for me.”
The philosophies with which we choose to express ourselves outwardly, especially as it pertains to gendered expressions, are much deeper than that. I wrote about it in an editor’s letter for our fashion issue last fall, about how style can’t be about rules of engagement as much as it has to be about our interactions and processings of the real world. Obviously femininity and masculinity have been performed by all genders across time, but we live in a particularly precarious time for trans and nonbinary people. It’s worth mentioning that gender nonconformity has always been popular within those communities, regardless of fashion’s acceptance of that. That being said, queerness has always been fashionable, avant garde, and imaginative, even when it’s gone unacknowledged, and therefore it’s no surprise that there’s something incredibly stylish about subversions of femininity and masculinity. From Donna Tartt to Chloe Sevigny to Doechii, fashionable women have always left room for ambiguity, and that’s why we stay obsessed with them to this day. It’s precisely in that rejection of the gendered dressing they inherited that their style truly shines.
And okay, I overstated what I meant. Girlhood isn’t “over.” Some people will always dress like that. Some people who started dressing in the coquette style that when it became dominant will continue dressing like that. The coquettish look, the girlhood era, all of that gave incredible and legacy-cementing popularity to designers like Simone Rocha, SHUSHU/TONG, Sandy Liang, and more, and those labels will have customers for life following this era. And people have been staking claim over “an end” to “the bows trend” for ages now, and I do personally think they’re wrong and a little annoying. It’s definitely not a new trend, but I find people love to claim something as “over” so they can act like they were early to when it eventually does die down. Hate to break it to you ladies and gentlemen, a party isn’t over just because you leave.
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