The rise in child-like aesthetics raises some questions: Are women attempting to connect with their inner child, or are they subconsciously striving to achieve the male gaze? Recently, there has been conversation around the theory of male attraction toward child-like appearances or behavior. The narrative of innocence, the social expectation of female grooming and cleanliness, and the physical characteristics of big, doll eyes, petite stature, and full cheeks all point to the depiction of a child. Often, women are compared to children and characterized as incapable of reasoning — ways in which men maintain power over women in domestic, professional, and political settings. Therefore, the gendered construction of the woman as a child manifests itself through the co-dependent relationship between large-scale socio-systematic channels and small-scale interpersonal and self-reflective relations. Can the fashion industry’s production and promotion of child-like fashion geared toward women be a representation of this mutually exclusive relationship?

Furthermore, does men’s attraction to child-like appearance and the systematic tools of misogyny and sexism apply to women’s interest or internalization of expressing child-like behavior? While female fashion adopts child-like aesthetics as an art form and capitalist achievement, male fashion primarily follows trends of minimalism, industrialism, and professionalism. Feminist existentialism explains that women and men are distinctly positioned around material realities and objects, such as clothing and cosmetics. The binary practices of gender create diverse and oppositional experiences, behaviors, and viewpoints. For example, women who align themselves with the practice of wearing makeup are rewarded for practicing femininity, while men who do so are criticized for being feminine. More specifically, men who choose to wear mini pleated skirts or puff-sleeved cottage dresses are ridiculed for exuding child-like performance, while women are adored.

Is this to say that women solely strive to please men, or that all men are perverts? Absolutely not. The creation and perpetuation of child-like aesthetics may solely be an escapist, nostalgic strive toward youth, or it may just be really fun and cute to wear chunky beads, pearls, puff-sleeved cottage dresses, and cozy Uggs. On the other hand, exploring the asymmetry of child-like aesthetics between women and men may reveal some insight we have not thought of before. Indeed, it would be interesting to investigate the history of child-like aesthetics, why hyper-femininity is so popular, or whether there are subconscious motivations of adopting or being attracted to child-like performance.