The Politics Of Innocence And Underwear

These themes became particularly popular back in 2022—the antithesis to the “pick me.” Instead of feigning rejection of femininity, girliness, and things that are socially marketed towards women, many of us leaned in. If being the “cool girl” that Gone Girl’s Amy Dunne described was what catered best to the male ego, it felt, at the time, as though the antidote to this mindset was overt displays of girlishness, and everything from our vocabulary to our underwear choices, began to shift.

“The word ‘girl’ is carrying a lot on its back these days, endlessly tacked onto other words to make them cute, empowering and sociologically meaningful, all at once. There are so many girls to be, and so many things to girl.” Danielle Cohen wrote in a 2023 article for The Cut, and the sentiment still holds up today. Some are adorning their bags and belts with plush toys and buying cutesy blind box figurines, others are wearing girlish underwear in pastels and cotton and pointelle to reconnect with our inner girls. Harmless nostalgia in theory, but when one subtle rebellion comes laden with the underpinnings of harmful tropes, are we just shifting focus?

There are plenty of reasons why “youthful” underwear styles have made their way back into the trend cycle. The first and most obvious example can be traced back to recent runways, where silk and lace slip dresses and undergarments have featured throughout collections. Take Chemena Kamali’s Chloé Fall/Winter 2025 show, for example, where numerous models were clad in vintage-inspired lace nightgowns—even bloomers, the previous season—or Miu Miu Fall/Winter 2025, where Miuccia Prada explored the “typical accessories of femininity” through peeks of silk slip dresses and undergarments via overcoats and jacket hems. Elsewhere, at Ann Demeulemeester, Stefano Gallici employed softness and romanticism via powder pinks, lilacs, mauves, with camisoles and dresses crafted of chiffon that were lasered into English eyelet.

Then there is film. 2025 marks the 25-year anniversary of Sofia Coppola’s debut movie, “The Virgin Suicides,” the Lisbon sisters’ quintet drenched in a blush colors, all cotton and floral and powdery, offering up an aesthetic world that so many women and girls connected to two-and-a-half decades ago, and still do today. The entire purpose of the Lisbon parents is to preserve their daughters' innocence as fiercely as possible, even if it kills them (literally). This is done, in part, through almost embalming them in girlhood via their clothing and environment. The enduring nostalgia around the film arrives in the same breath as the influx of trad-wife content and a far-right rhetoric that cloaks itself in softness and “femininity.”

Also to consider: trending virginal whites and the way religion and religious symbolism may interact with the growing wave of celibacy amongst young (particularly heterosexual) women who are fed up with the dating scene and are swearing off sex and romance to deprioritize male validation. The motivation is credible, sensible, liberating! It’s something that many sexually active people may want to do at one stage to better understand their relationship with their body and sexuality. In the same breath, this new brand of sexual liberation comes at risk of being co-opted by the alt-right community, and before we know it, we’re wrestling with the politics of purity once more.

When girlhood becomes arranged as adjacent to conservatism, where does that leave us in terms of our underwear choices?

In an attempt to de-center from the male gaze, the antithesis of the “cool girl” beckons with the promise of innocence and youthfulness, but has just as much capacity to backfire. The temptation of innocence is a well-recorded concept throughout history: The value of a virgin in the 19th and early 20th centuries, schoolgirl tropes in pop culture and pornography, Nabokov’s blockbuster novel “Lolita,” wherein self-proclaimed pedophile Humbert Humbert romanticizes, falls in love with, and kidnaps a twelve-year-old girl. As much as there is a call to reclaim the aesthetics of girlhood, how much of it still caters to these fantasies?

Finally: when—if ever—will women be able to make choices that don’t place us in the center of a fantasy? When all is said and done, most of us just want to reconnect with the girls who left us too young in pursuit of becoming a woman. I hid the first lace thong I purchased on an unsupervised visit to the mall from my mom for months. No one ever saw it, but it made me feel powerful and sexy and much older than I was when I wore it under my school clothes. Now, I opt for full cotton briefs. White ones with bows and pale yellow mid-rise panties as I enter the final years of my twenties, desperate to get closer to the girl who was so eager to grow up as fast as she could.