There was a time in the mid-2000s when metropolitan women lived by the mantra: “Put a belt on it.” At least, this was an express directive that had been disseminated en masse via television shows like What Not to Wear and How to Look Good Naked–the same programs that encouraged people to categorize their bodies into adverse fruit shapes. The solution to being a dreaded apple, pear, strawberry or banana, we were told, was to bring attention to the waist and create the illusion of an hourglass silhouette with an impractical belt.
But times have changed and pop culture no longer compares women to foodstuffs. (Unless perhaps you spent 2023 aligning yourself with the characteristics of a strawberry girl or a vanilla girl.) Nevertheless, Kaia Gerber last night reintroduced young, fashionable women to the pleasure of fastening a sizable belt around the mid-waist of a long-sleeved T-shirt. The model was attending Olivia Rodrigo’s concert in New York, but looked as though she could have been attending a PinkPantheress concert–because no famous person has committed themselves to the true-thousands aesthetic quite as much as PinkPantheress and all her disc belts and pedal pushers.
Even a cursory glance at the back pages of Getty Images will reveal hundreds of photographs of Kim Kardashian and Keira Knightley posing at film premieres and charity galas in hulking belts and three-quarter-length trousers. The whole thing has just as much functionality as the thin useless scarf, another mid-’00s trend which saw Kate Moss, Lenny Kravitz and Hilary Duff drape floss-thin, knee-scraping bits of fabric around their necks, often with a strange graphic tee and a newsies cap. But some 20 years on, the waist-scaffolding belt is being worn with less oddball excess than it was in the Noughties. Gerber, for example, looks as though she has been shopping at Knwls, and not a regional outlet of Francesca’s Collections in 2005.