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Writer's pictureKyra Karatsu

A Final Bow for Balletcore?

Image by Kazuo Ota on Unsplash.


When Kendall Jenner posed for Vogue España in 2016, she probably was not expecting a community of dancers to be up in arms in her Instagram comments. Jenner, who sported dancewear and ballet shoes, simply posed for the cameras – her ballerina-inspired image eventually landing a spot on both her Instagram feed and Vogue Spain’s official YouTube account. Prancing around in several ballet-inspired outfits, the shoot appeared to be largely inoffensive and even inspirational.


“I had to grow up pretty fast, I love being a kid, to run around like a child just not caring,” Jenner said in the video, which has since been deleted from YouTube. “I’ve always been adventurous, so I love doing stuff like that, I don’t know, just stupid stuff. I love walking around – being able to be free.”


Dancers and dance enthusiasts, however, did not take kindly to Jenner’s seemingly harmless message of childish carelessness and whimsical freedom. “Ballet dancers don't train 7+ hours a day, 7 days a week, to be represented by Kendall Jenner & her dodgy feet,” read one Twitter response by @ohsolucee. “Kendall Jenner's ballet photo shoot is literally SO offensive you can't just put on pointe shoes and go for it oh my god,” fellow Twitter user @macjohnson131 said.


Taking even less kindly to an image of Jenner clad in a long, golden dress and the iconic ballerina pointe shoes, Instagram comments were laced with a similar bitterness and animosity towards Jenner’s “crime” against ballet. But Jenner wasn’t the first to vex the online dance community. In fact, a whole fashion trend has come under fire, with ballet dancers particularly ruffled by all things tulle and tutu.


While ballet-inspired fashion apparel has a long history that spans back to Chanel’s 1930s tulle gowns, “balletcore” is the frilly and distinctly feminine aesthetic that has emerged from the whimsical fascination with ballerina fashion. Though the style is often characterized by ballet flats, wrap sweaters, tulle skirts, and bows, balletcore is, interestingly enough, a branch of “bodycon” and “athleisure.” And, with form-fitting leotards and cozy tights, the trend is underscored by an affiliation with quarantine comfort.


“Balletcore is a spin-off of trends that began with cottagecore and evolved to princesscore and beyond," fashion historian Rachel Weingarten said in a 2022 interview for Teen Vogue. "During the pandemic, we fetishized athleisure wear as we stopped pretending to get dressed up for all our Zooms… Balletcore feels almost like a security blanket in a way. We can hold onto the cute clothing we wore as [children] in a grown-up fashion.”


Yet, the balletcore aesthetic has grown beyond basic athleisure wear in recent years. With fashion designers drawing inspiration from the ballet studio (notable examples being Simone Rocha and Molly Goddard’s 2022 Spring/Summer Collections), ballet apparel has been dissected and uniquely reassembled for the runway. Commercially speaking, balletcore has also caught the eye of retailers. While ballet flats have been on the market and widely popular since the 1960s, some fashion companies have recently taken it one step further. 2022-2023, in particular, has seen the release of Urban Outfitters’ “Balletcore Trend” and Anthropologie’s “En Pointe” fashion lines, their retailed items sewn with satin, tulle, and lace. 


Driving the market, of course, are the consumers. The trend is particularly profitable online, with Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok influencers fueling the demand for ballet-inspired items. On Instagram, American social media influencer Indy Blue posed in a satin wrap skirt with $950 Miu Miu ballet flats – a post that garnered her online and media attention. On YouTube, “How to wear BALLETCORE Ballet Aesthetic Outfits” by Fab Sakker gave a comprehensive run down of the style’s history as well as a helpful style guide. 

And on TikTok, where the #balletcore tag has seen some of its best days amongst its predominantly Gen. Z crowd, users like @moeblackx are avid proponents of embracing the style as a sort of counterculture against the “skinny, long-legged white girl” image that overwhelmingly permeates the artform.


However, not all attention is positive attention. If Kendall Jenner’s 2016 photoshoot was any indication of the ballet community’s anti-balletcore fervor, then the post-2020 rise of the #balletcore trend is an entirely different beast of its own. While the dance community’s concerns stretch far and wide, they can often be boiled down to issues with the aesthetic’s use of non-dancer models, problematic undertones, and the overall portrayal of ballet dancers. And, much like balletcore enthusiasm, balletcore discourse is often exchanged online and amongst dancers – both former and current, amateur and professional. Whether it’s writing comments or video reactions, much of the dance community has made their stance clear: #balletcore has got to go.


At the heart of the Instagram anti-balletcore movement is one account by the handle @modelsdoingballet. Amassing more than 80k followers, the Instagram page has become an amusing, but alarming repository of non-dancer models posing in dancewear or ballet-inspired items since its creation in 2020.


Katie Malia and Suzanne Jolie are the masterminds behind the rapidly successful satire account, with both creators hailing from lengthy dance backgrounds – Malia is a longtime dancer and currently works with "Raggle Taggle Dance Hour” in Los Angeles, and Jolie is a performer and instructor at Santa Clarita Ballet. 


Although now swamped with their own creative projects, Malia and Jolie have given extensive interviews in years past, always citing the need for accurate representation of ballet dancers – especially in the modeling industry.


“Our mission is simple,” Malia and Jolie wrote to Pointe Magazine, “If a brand is going to do a ballet or dance-inspired shoot, then hire real dancers. It takes a lifetime of grueling training to be able to pose correctly (and dare we say safely) in pointe shoes. There is an entire community of trained dancers who would love to work professionally and do us proud.”


Further digging balletcore’s grave is the image it often projects or, rather, recycles. Ballet has historically favored a very specific, yet very prominent demographic – the rich, white, and thin. The systematic preference long predates the balletcore movement, with choreographer George Balanchine largely attributed to perpetuating the so-called standard during his reign at New York City Ballet. Weeding out the “curvier” dancers – whose body types largely dominated the artform until the 1950s – from his dance pieces, Balanchine promoted dancers with a certain “aesthetic” (i.e., long-legged and thin) to the stage.


But while creators such as TikTok influencer @moeblackx strive to reimagine the culture through fashion, some dancers argue that the balletcore market remains too oversaturated with Balanchine’s ideals for actual progress to occur.


At the CSU Northridge Dance Department, dancers Francesca Mercier and Annabella Ferraiuolo voiced several concerns about embracing the aesthetic. “I’ve mostly seen balletcore on people with the stereotypical thin body that TikTok and many other social media sites promote,” Mercier said. 


Ferraiuolo further mentioned that the clothing itself is “super tight fitting and skimpy.” “It would make me feel way less comfortable wearing that than actual ballet clothes,” she commented.


The discrepancy between fashion and reality is particularly problematic in the dance world. Such qualms don’t come totally unwarranted, however. The artform is not only highly competitive but also psychologically and physically demanding. Many dancers begin training at a young age, though very few break into the professional world. According to arts reporting site BFAMFAPhD, around 10% of dancers who actively pursue a career in dance become professionals. And, just looking at just pre-professional schools, academies like the prestigious School of American Ballet accept fewer than 100 students every year across their five levels.


Pointe Magazine’s Editor in Chief, Amy Brandt, further mentioned that the dedication to becoming a ballet dancer extends beyond classes and rehearsals at the studio. “You need inner strength to push through tough choreography when you’re tired and your feet hurt, or when you’re unhappy with your performance or a role you receive,” said Brandt.


So, when balletcore reduces the aesthetic of ballet to frills and bows, the disrespect cuts deeper than just a small scratch. It’s part of the reason why ballet dancers take the trend so seriously – while balletcore ransacks the artform, the trend offers little acknowledgment of the profession that many sacrifice everything to get into. It minimizes the lived experiences of dancers.


Charlotte Dunne was once a dancer with the Santa Clarita Ballet Academy and, later, the Santa Clarita Ballet Company – ironically, the same studio that @modelsdoingballet co-creator Suzanne Jolie now teaches at. Displeased with the direction of the aesthetic, Dunne voiced that balletcore is not only demeaning but also promotes a wildly inaccurate depiction of the dance world amongst non-dancers.


“I think that, for the most part, ballet dancers don't like the trend because it inaccurately simplifies the art form into pretty clothes and completely throws away what ballet is truly about,” Dunne said. “Items of clothing like shoes with ribbons you can tie up to your knee portray ballet as childish and cartoony, two things which real ballet is not. It seems to me that ballet dancers find that balletcore pokes fun at a profession that, in reality, is harsh and grueling work.”


Fellow dancer Claire O’Connell further brought up a valid criticism of the trend in her comments – who is the trend really made for? As a longtime dancer at Santa Clarita Ballet alongside Dunne and, briefly, UC Irvine, O'Connell has come to question the aesthetic’s transparency as a “progressive, body-positive trend.”


“[The demographic is the] same people that have been historically favored in the ballet world, young, skinny, white women,” O’Connell mentioned. “The clothing itself is competitive – can you pull off a skin-tight unitard and wrap sweater? It's basically a test to see if you're conventionally attractive enough to not get made fun of for wearing a unitard and bun cover to a biology lab.”


Still, at the end of the day, unitards and wrap sweaters are just that – unitards and wrap sweaters. When the world is overwhelmed with stories of climate crises, political turmoil, and wartime conflict, fashion doesn’t seem to rank very highly on the list of priorities. Online debate often gains the reputation of being overly dramatic or frivolous as well – especially when compared next to “real-life” injustices that infiltrate society. Speaking on Jenner’s 2016 balletcore scandal, social media users were quick to point out that Jenner had much heavier, grave allegations against her, including the appropriation of dreadlocks as a white woman.


So just how trivial is trivial? Even some dancers can admit that the trend is relatively benign. “It's fun and nostalgic and if it gets people interested in ballet, I'll take it as a positive,” O’Connell further commented. “As a dancer, I wouldn't say it's true to my experience, but it's social media, it's fun and relatively harmless, so I feel pretty neutral about the trend in general.”


Nevertheless, there’s always still room to laugh at the absurdity of the faux frills and tutus – even amongst a community that might seem especially uptight about protecting their artform from commodification and misrepresentation.


“We like to joke and say, ‘How are there so many?‘ or ‘We hate how easy this is!‘ Forget the fetishization and ballet cosplay, we’re talking straight up basics like not having pointe shoe ribbons tied up to your knees,” said the creators of @modelsdoingballet in an interview for Dance Informa. “But hey, we’re unfortunately here for it, so the content keeps coming. Hold on to your butts.”


REFERENCES


Originally written for WRIT107M: Writing for Magazines.


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