Adults Shouldn’t Care This Much About What Teens Wear to Prom
Universal things people like: nostalgia, living vicariously, witnessing rites of passage. But participation in these things also starts to feel a little off when the vicarious living is via very real teen people sharing their true lives on social media. Enter: prom season.Dress shopping, getting ready, and posing with your date are all current nostalgia bait traps. It’s a chance to reminisce, lament about the chiffon, three-tiered ruffle gown you wore, and wonder if you’d been born in the “minimalist clean girl” era how different your dress would have been.TikTok, in particular, has invited in a FaceTime-level feeling of content intimacy. Breeding the interesting reality that when prom season comes around, strangers on the internet give their unsolicited opinions on every teenager’s outfit. And the appeal of having one of your comments on a viral video rack in thousands of Likes might have led to an increase in berating teens under the guise of comedy, especially during prom season. If it were teen peers, this would be a different conversation. But it seems that the loudest group of prom-goer detractors are adults.YouTubeMaybe that’s because the entire aesthetic of prom has shifted recently. From the surge in vintage shopping habits to the pandemic’s emphasis on style with comfort, it’s not wild to think the idea of prom dressing has gotten overall more casual. Some teens are finding their prom looks at stores like Anthropologie and ASOS—dresses that technically could be worn to any somewhat nicer occasion. Which has led to people saying those types of dresses are “better suited for brunch,” not prom.YouTubeSo who does it hurt if a random teen wears a satin ankle-length dress?The fun thing about style is that it is personal to us. We get to set the rules around the pieces we wear, and we shouldn’t succumb to trends just because everyone else is doing them. So who does it hurt if a random teen wears a satin ankle-length dress?But it isn’t just more surface-level style critiques—it goes deeper. If they’re not being reprimanded about how casual their dress is, they’re dealing with a racist or regressive take on it. In areas like Miami, Florida, and other Southern states, Black teen prom content is being dubbed “hood prom,” stemming from the extravagant custom gowns, suits, and pre-prom send-off parties they choose to have.View full post on TikTokBlack children do not need to hear white supremacist ideology regurgitated at them in video stitch form because they posted a 20-second video showing off their jeweled prom look. Everyone has gotten way too comfortable dissecting one another and it’s destroying something that should be fun and memorable for high schoolers.Most teens online are just participating in a digital ecosystem that our society created, without the frontal lobe or wherewithal to understand the kind of harm they’re subjecting themselves to.And, yes, young people do get online and ask for opinions, even asking for help picking a prom dress. But even those genuine moments (that feature something important: an actual request for advice!) often get overshadowed by comments that are inappropriate or uncalled for. It’s not unheard of to find an older woman suggesting a teen wear a girdle or invest in shapewear or, in some cases, add that their body types aren’t meant for certain dress silhouettes.YouTubeMost teens online are just participating in a digital ecosystem that our society created, without the frontal lobe or wherewithal to understand the kind of harm they’re subjecting themselves to. So it’s on adults to carry that responsibility. The aesthetics of prom have changed in 5, 10, 20 years, as all fashion does. Shouting about it in a teen’s comment section isn’t going to change it, and if you can’t reminisce without tearing someone down, maybe it’s time to turn some of that energy inward.Aiyana Ishmael is the style editor at Cosmopolitan magazine. In her work, Aiyana focuses on the culture of fashion and how it intertwines and shapes the zeitgeist. She is an award-winning journalist from Miami, Florida, and a graduate of the historically Black university, Florida A&M. She is a 2024 Forbes 30 Under 30: Media honoree, and her debut romance novella PASSING GAME is set to release March of 2027 (831 Stories/Simon & Schuster).
