Your eyes aren’t deceiving you — bulbous bubble hemlines are back. Whether in the form of a skirt or a dress, designers like Jonathan Anderson, Marc Jacobs, Azzedine Alaïa, among many others, have been creating eye-catching voluminous garments lately. Shoppers are loving the look too: Elle cites data showing a 742 percent year-over-year increase in purchases of bubble skirts and an 176 percent increase for bubble dresses.
Although “bubble hem” might evoke images of neon-hued numbers from the 1980s, its lineage goes much farther back. Significantly more sophisticated takes from early-20th-century designers like Jeanne Lanvin and Paul Poiret were key to the style’s development and inform the approach of designers today. “It’s really the maestro of cut and form himself, Cristóbal Balenciaga, who can be credited with giving full expression to the bubble-shaped silhouette as early as 1950,” Cassidy Zachary, cohost of the Dressed: The History of Fashion podcast, told Elle. “While history remembers these voluminous, puffed masterpieces as ‘balloons,’ they’re absolutely what we would recognize as the trending bubble hem of today.”
Whether ‘80s looks are totally your speed or you’d prefer to turn the dial back several decades more, it’s safe to say that the bubble-hemline trend is far from bursting.
