Remember when we all collectively decided that 2023 was the summer of being soft? Pilates princess energy, Black girl luxury, ‘Clean Girl’ styling, and viral sounds telling us to romanticize our lives on repeat. We were supposed to be curating our lives like Pinterest boards: pastel everything, oat milk lattes as personality traits, and a commitment to looking perpetually unbothered in linen sets.
But here’s the thing: that era is over. And if we’re being honest, it was never just about aesthetics.
The Pipeline We Didn’t See Coming
What started as “soft girl summer” quickly morphed into clean girl aesthetics, then minimalism, then suddenly we were all watching Nara Smith make elaborate meals in full glam while her kids sat quietly in the background. Somewhere along the way, being soft stopped being about rest and started being about something else entirely: palatability. And for Black women specifically, it became a pipeline straight into conservative ideals about femininity, beauty, and our place in the world.
Let’s call it what it is. The rise of trad wife content wasn’t accidental. Creators like Nara Smith and influencers like SheraSeven have built entire platforms around repackaging traditional gender roles as aspirational lifestyle content. The message is clear: the ideal woman is quiet, decorative, submissive, and exists primarily in service to her husband and children. And when these ideals get wrapped in beautiful cinematography, trending sounds, and the promise of a “high value” life, it becomes easy to miss what’s actually being sold.
For Black women, this hits different. We’ve spent generations fighting for autonomy, for the right to work, to be educated, to exist outside of servitude. And now, in 2025, we’re watching a cultural shift that’s trying to convince us that going back is going forward.
The Beauty Standards Are Changing (Again)
If you’ve been paying attention, you’ve noticed the shifts. The celebration of curves that felt hard-won just a few years ago is quietly being replaced. Suddenly everyone’s on Ozempic or getting “snatched” in ways that prioritize thinness over thickness. The Pilates girlies are everywhere, and while there’s nothing wrong with Pilates, there’s something worth examining about why this particular form of exercise, often associated with wealth, whiteness, and a specific body type, is the ultimate standard in fitness.
Then there’s hair. The “straight natural” trend where women are only wearing their natural hair bone straight, often with the help of excessive heat or treatments that border on chemical processing but get to keep the “natural” label because technically, it’s still your hair. It’s giving respectability politics. It’s giving “I’m natural, but not too natural.”
And let’s not even get started on fashion. Pretty Little Thing, a brand that built its name on ultra-revealing club wear and fast fashion designed for women with surgically enhanced or naturally curvy bodies, recently rebranded to be more “elevated” and conservative. Translation: less of the bold, unapologetic aesthetic that appealed to Black and brown women, more muted tones and modest cuts. The message is loud: the style that celebrated our bodies and our boldness is out. Minimalism, modesty, and looking “expensive” are in.
What’s Really Happening Here
This isn’t just about trends. It’s about control. It’s about a cultural moment where Black women’s autonomy, visibility, and power are being met with pushback disguised as empowerment. We’re being told that the way to be valued is to be smaller, quieter, more traditional, more conservative. To shrink ourselves into a version of femininity that was never designed with us in mind and has historically been used to oppress us.
The obsession with looking “clean” and “put together” at all times, the rise of content that romanticizes domestic labor without acknowledging who that labor has historically been forced upon, the push toward body types and beauty standards that require wealth, access, and often medical intervention to achieve. None of this is neutral. All of it is political.
And when we see Black women at the center of promoting these ideals, whether it’s through trad wife content, hyper-feminine submission rhetoric, or beauty standards that erase our natural features, we have to ask: who benefits? Because it’s rarely us.
We’ve Seen This Before
This isn’t new. Black women have always been at the center of debates about respectability, desirability, and worthiness. We’ve been told to straighten our hair, shrink our bodies, lower our voices, and make ourselves digestible in order to be safe, loved, or respected. We’ve watched our mothers and grandmothers navigate these same pressures, often with grace but always at a cost.
The difference now is that it’s being sold to us as choice, as empowerment, as self-care. We’re told that if we just follow this routine, buy these products, adopt this lifestyle, we’ll finally be valued. But the truth is, we were always valuable. We just keep being convinced otherwise.
So What’s Actually Next?
If the soft girl era was a pipeline to conservatism, then what’s next has to be a complete rejection of the idea that our worth is tied to how well we perform femininity for someone else’s comfort.
What’s next is recognizing that rest doesn’t require us to be decorative. That femininity doesn’t have to mean submission. That our beauty, in all its forms, textured hair, curves, boldness, loudness, doesn’t need to be softened to be worthy of celebration.
What’s next is us, fully realized, unapologetically present, and unwilling to shrink for a culture that’s always been uncomfortable with our fullness. We’re not here to be palatable. We’re here to be free.
The soft girl era is over. And honestly? Good. We were never meant to be confined anyway.
