I used to think balletcore was just another TikTok trend that would vanish by spring.
But here’s the thing: the aesthetic has roots that twist back through decades of visual culture, from Sofia Coppola’s dreamy film palettes to the way Degas painted his dancers in shadowy rehearsal rooms, all tutus and exhaustion. Balletcore isn’t really about ballet—not the art form, anyway, with its brutal discipline and bloodied pointe shoes. It’s about the idea of ballet: the romanticism, the Swan Lake fantasy, the soft-focus femininity that exists mostly in our collective imagination. What we’re seeing now, splashed across Instagram feeds and fashion campaigns, is a kind of visual shorthand for grace and effort coexisting, even though—wait, maybe especially because—most of us will never experience either at that level. The aesthetic borrows heavily from classical ballet’s visual vocabulary: pale pink, ribbon ties, tulle, leg warmers worn with an ironic wink, that specific kind of messy bun that looks effortless but definitely isn’t. It’s nostalgic without being tied to any particular era, which is probably why it works so well in our current moment of aesthetic chaos.
Turns out, dance-inspired fashion has been cycling through visual culture for roughly a century, give or take. The 1970s had its own ballet moment—Danskin bodysuits, wrap cardigans, that whole Jane Fonda thing. The early 2000s gave us Juicy Couture tracksuits that borrowed athleisure’s flexibility without the sweat.
Balletcore feels different, though. Maybe it’s the way it showed up during the pandemic, when we were all stuck at home craving beauty and discipline in equal measure. Or maybe it’s just that social media has made every aesthetic move faster and more self-aware.
When Movement Becomes Mood Board Material Instead of Athletic Expression
The weird thing about balletcore is how it strips movement from the equation entirely.
You don’t need to dance to participate in this trend—you don’t even need to have seen a ballet. You just need to understand the visual grammar: wrap tops, satin ribbons, a certain kind of wistful expression that suggests artistic suffering without the actual suffering part. I’ve seen fashion campaigns where models pose in pointe shoes they clearly can’t walk in, let alone dance in, and somehow that’s the point. The aesthetic celebrates the trappings of ballet while sidesteping the reality of it—the injuries, the eating disorders, the toxic perfectionism that pervades professional dance culture. It’s a sanitized version, all Pinterest boards and soft lighting. Which, honestly, makes sense for visual culture. We’ve always been better at consuming the pretty surfaces than reckoning with the complicated depths beneath. Street style photographers started catching balletcore in the wild around 2021, maybe 2022: leg warmers over jeans, ballet flats (yes, actually practical shoes became trendy), sheer fabrics that nodded to dancewear without being costumes. Brands like Miu Miu and Sandy Liang leaned hard into the trend, and suddenly ballet wrap tops were everywhere, worn by people who definately had never taken a pliĆ© in their lives.
The Intersection Where Classical Training Vocabulary Meets Contemporary Digital Consumption Patterns
Anyway, there’s something almost melancholy about watching ballet become pure aesthetic.
I guess it makes sense in a culture that increasingly values the look of things over the experience of them. We collect images of experiences we’ll never have, curate identities from aesthetic fragments borrowed from a dozen different sources. Balletcore fits perfectly into that pattern—it’s aspirational without requiring aspiration, artistic without demanding art. The classical ballet vocabulary gets flattened into mood boards: arabesque becomes a pose for photos, not a position that takes years to perfect; tutus become party skirts divorced from their function; pointe shoes become decorative objects hung on walls. There’s a kind of cultural amnesia happening, where the signifiers float free from their origins, recombined into something new and arguably less meaningful. But maybe that’s too harsh. Maybe there’s value in making beauty accessible, even if it’s a simplified version. Fashion has always borrowed from subcultures and art forms, extracting their visual essence and selling it back to us as lifestyle. Balletcore is just the latest iteration of that process, dressed in pink satin and surrounded by fairy lights.
The aesthetic will probably fade eventually, replaced by whatever comes next in the endless cycle of trend and counter-trend.
But for now, it’s everywhere—a soft rebellion against the harsh minimalism that dominated the 2010s, a return to romance and decoration and visible femininity. Whether that’s progressive or regressive probably depends on who you ask and what they’re trying to sell you.
