It’s official, folks. When it comes to online trends, Blackness is out. It seems that the internet’s long-standing obsession with Black fashion and beauty trends has come to an end.
Celebrities and influencers like Ariana Grande and the Kardashian family have relinquished their fake tans and surgically enlarged butts — looks that emulate Black style icons from the ‘90s, like Aaliyah and Naomi Campbell. As Black student-run Instagram page The Darkest Hue argues, these celebrities are ditching Black aesthetics for more mature and respected public personas.
And the rest of the internet is following suit, as there has been a recent surge of cosmetic dissolutions and surgical removal procedures in the US, like lip filler dissolutions and reverse Brazilian butt lifts, also known as BBLs.
While this may seem like just another natural case of trend cycling of fashion and beauty standards, I believe this shift reflects something larger. This switch is deeply linked to an overarching cultural progression towards conservatism, elitism, and white supremacy.
Rise of the culture vultures
The 2010s saw great interest and investment in Black culture, particularly when it came to fashion and beauty trends. From big hoop earrings to sneakers, fashion trends heavily borrowed from Black culture.
With this interest came ‘culture vultures’ like the Kardashian family, who took these distinctly Black style markers and popularized them as trends in online spheres that branched beyond the Black community. They showed how, through cosmetic procedures, anyone could buy a bigger butt, fuller lips, and a year-round golden tan — features associated with Black women.
They perpetuated the objectification and dehumanization of the Black people from whom these ‘trends’ emerged. They essentially marketed Blackness as appealing — as long as underneath all the Black trends and clothing, you’re still white.
Prominent non-Black figures like the Kardashians didn’t just popularize these trends, they profited from them. Kylie Jenner’s infamous lip kits — which seemingly promised consumers a perfect replication of her iconic pouty lip — made more than 420 million USD in their first 18 months on the market. I believe it was this massive financial success garnered by wealthy figures, like the Kardashians, that prompted many ordinary people to realize what these celebrities were actually doing — repackaging Black style with a white face and selling it at an upcharge.
As members of the Black community and primarily Black women began speaking out against the blatant appropriation of their cultures’ artifacts, the discourse surrounding ‘Blackfishing’ and cultural appropriation began to surface. This discourse prompted many to consider whether the cultural fascination with Black fashion and Black bodies was something to be celebrated or scorned.
To me, the answer couldn’t be clearer. Public figures took advantage of a longstanding system of cultural colonization that profits from Black innovation by centring white people as ‘innovators’ and erasing the Black roots of these ideas. In doing so, they perpetuated the objectification and dehumanization of the Black people from whom these ‘trends’ emerged. They essentially marketed Blackness as appealing — as long as underneath all the Black trends and clothing, you’re still white.
Commandeering conservative style
While the 2010s were all about adopting Black culture, it seems like the decline of these trends can be traced to sometime around the COVID-19 pandemic. The pandemic massively destabilized global economies including Canada’s, which saw mass economic slowdowns and skyrocketing unemployment rates.
I think the post-pandemic economic downturn similarly elicited increasingly conservative values and fashion trends, especially among young people. Support for the Conservative Party by Canadians between the ages of 18–35 has risen to 37 per cent in 2024 — up from 21 per cent from 2015 — with Canadian youth citing the housing crisis and the economy as key concerns.
One key way that this ideological shift manifested in fashion was with an idealization of wealth and status. Amid economic insecurity, many people scramble to project a false facade of ‘quiet’ wealth and luxury.
In 2023, the internet saw the emergence of fashion and beauty trends like ‘clean girl makeup,’ ‘stealth wealth,’ and the ‘old money’ aesthetic. Kylie Jenner’s once-viral pouty lips and long eyelashes were replaced with slicked-back buns and minimal makeup. Fashion trends like big hoop earrings were traded for pearls. Preppy, Jackie Kennedy-esque looks and minimalist, ‘classier’ pieces became the new aesthetic standard.
The ideals championed by these aesthetics were ‘class’ and a kind of effortless elegance that came from looking like you’d just returned from the country club or a polo match. Though the shift felt sudden to me at the time, style analysts had seen it coming for a while.
In a 2021 interview with the Oracle Times, Andrew Goves — a University of Westminster professor of fashion design — predicted that during “times of economic downturn, high unemployment, and an uncertain future, not only do we adopt a far more traditional and formal approach to what we wear, but we also look for such conservative aesthetics with whom we want to do business.”
In a post-pandemic world, the attention economy — a market controlled by our online interests and the exchange of digital clout — coincided with the financial one, prompting people to retreat back to cultural signifiers of social and economic security in contrastingly insecure times. Much like the ethos of conservative political parties, the style community opted to look to the past for a way forward. By abandoning the ‘tasteless colours’ and ‘gaudy curves and curls’ — shedding all traces of Blackness, celebrities and influencers could position themselves as members of the new elite, securing their power in rocky times.
It’s bigger than beauty trends
Does it really matter if we all suddenly want to look ‘clean’ and ‘classy’? I believe that it does because it implies that we all previously looked ‘dirty’ and ‘classless.’ Considering that many people participating in the new ‘preppy’ aesthetics used to appropriate ‘Black’ trends, the shift from one trend cycle to the other is effectively a shift from the practice of Blackness to the practice of whiteness.
Trends like ‘stealth wealth’ and ‘clean girl’ do not just embody wealth, conservatism, and cultural elitism — they also represent whiteness. The majority of ‘old money’ families — upon whom the ‘old money’ fashion and lifestyle aesthetic is based — are white. This is a result of historical practices of oppression, exploitation, and exclusion that systematically prevented families of colour — especially Black families — from accumulating generational wealth, which led to classist segregation based on race.
Because Blackness is socioculturally positioned as the antithesis of whiteness, any trend that idolizes whiteness will exclude Black people. I think the ‘old money’ trend promotes cultural in-grouping among white people while facilitating the exclusion of Black people to a cultural out-group. These dynamics mimic the historical practices of systematic segregation and social hierarchies.
By romanticizing white aesthetics and associating them with qualities like elegance and class, we are signalling our solidarity with a broader system of exclusivity that upholds racial inequality. It’s just another way society has strategically morphed to redraw the lines of the social order, leaving Black bodies out in the cold.
Iman Sadiku is a second-year student at New College studying philosophy and chemistry.
