The new Tween Status look: LoveShackFancy dresses and Golden Goose sneakers

A LoveShackFancy mini dress or skirt is the keystone of the tween and teen look of the moment, which also includes bare legs, sneakers (often shabby-chic Golden Gooses or white Nike Air Force Ones) and sometimes sweatshirts. hoodie from streetwear brands like Off White. The Looks Ground Zero is the neighborhood around the LoveShackFancy store on the Upper East Side, a prime enclave where groups of teenagers from private schools parade the streets in almost identical outfits. Thanks, however, to the democratizing effects of social media and rampant dupes, clones of these real-life Gossip Girls can also be found everywhere from Gothenburg to Grosse Pointe.

Jill Kargman, an Upper East Side resident and one of the neighborhood’s saltiest columnists, has timed the trend both in her own brood of teens and among the tweens she hangs out with. You see a group approaching with LoveShack flowers and ruffles with Golden Goose sneakers… You just see packages on the street going up Madison Avenue, she observed. It’s so funny.

Ms. Kargman sees the look as a softer, more appropriate alternative to the previous pre-teen status outfit: bodycon dresses. I used to feel horrified when my 18 year old was more of a preteen, and… wearing those BCBG bandage dresses that look like vaporized. I used to fucking say four casually, she recalls. Although the LoveShackFancy hems are short, she said, they are tempered by the softness of the ruffles and prints, so [the girls] don’t look like little skanks. And the sneakers mean the look is practical for walking around after school. I almost think it’s kind of a reverse Kardashian, Ms. Kargman ventured.

Tweens’ obsession with LoveShackFancy has been simmering for a few years now, and is now reaching a boiling point. The brand was launched in 2013 by former Cosmopolitan editor Rebecca Hessel Cohen. She first designed a small collection of bridesmaid dresses with her mother, Nancy Hessel Weber, former creative director of Seventeen magazine. It has since evolved to include knits, jewelry and accessories for all ages, as well as a growing line of home items. But while Ms Hessel Cohen has always viewed her brand as intergenerational, with grandmothers shopping alongside daughters and granddaughters, she’s not quite sure how the tween came about. She calls it a crazy cult phenomenon, and describes extravagant LoveShackFancy-themed birthday parties and coveted packages of LSF goodies parents send to boarding school students. When the brand opened its Bleecker Street store, star child Suri Cruise and her friends were among the first to arrive.

Ms. Hessel Cohen engaged this young population, trying to get more into TikTok and using teen models for some collections. Each season, the brand makes several prints and fabrics of the popular teen Natasha dresses at $ 295, a status item at graduation and bar and bat mitzvahs, as well as basic mini skirts, which start at around. $ 225 and are considered an entry point to the brand. She also knows that stores have become after-school hangouts for young girls. We have tried to open up, of course, in neighborhoods and places where it’s a very nice community of mothers, daughters, all year round, she said.

Unlike counterfeit versions, the LSF-and-Golden-Goose-sneaker look doesn’t come cheap. But in American colleges and high schools, integration has rarely been accessible. Some tweens I spoke to to browse LoveShackFancy sales or buy used parts; others stubbornly save money to be able to afford a skirt; some opt for cheaper alternatives from brands like Reformation and Aerie. Still others, as Anastasia Gerrans, a Seattle personal shopper, 20, explained, simply convince their parents to buy it for them. To complete the outfit, the deliberately aged Golden Goose Superstar sneakers cost $ 495, but the Nike Air Force Ones cost less than $ 100.

Marin Archer, a 23-year-old Bostonian who describes herself as a jack-of-all-trades (working as a nanny, Amazon Prime buyer at Whole Foods, and freelance graphic designer), is older than the average wearer of this look but engages with d other fans on his animated Pinterest page. As she points out, a lot of the young women who post photos of the style can’t afford to buy it off the rack. I realize that’s an aspiration for a lot of people, Ms. Archer said. I know people keep these pins or look at these outfits knowing that a lot of them aren’t affordable for a lot of people, she continued. She first tried the trend by renting a LoveShackFancy skirt from the Nuuly subscription clothing rental service, then committed to buying one after falling in love with it.

While once such an elitist, designer-driven trend was perhaps most prevalent on the coast, social media is now spreading it widely. Ms Gerrans explained, on TikTok in particular, it’s become so popular that almost everyone seems to love the brand. Most of the content on this on TikTok, Pinterest, Instagram, and VSCO is positive, with the girls exchanging outfit selfies and suggestions on how to style their hair. The occasional haters will mainly weigh on the sheepskin quality of dressing like your friends, both the real ones and the thousands you meet online.

But don’t be so quick to judge young women who want to dress alike, warns social scientist Dr. Wednesday Martin, author of Primates of Park Avenue. From an anthropological point of view, she explained, we are ready to look for group connections, because in the past it would help us survive against predators. Not having a group identity can feel like death, as being isolated in our evolutionary history literally meant you were going to die. And after a year where these young girls have been sequestered in their rooms, unable to see their friends, they feel even more eager to form alliances. As Dr Martin said, solidifying your group identity after a pandemic is especially urgent if you are a young woman. Homo sapiens leaves in the form of packs of girls in ruffled skirts and scuffed sneakers: forward!