The bubble hem trend is made for letting loose in 2024

These are polarising and you cannot expect them to be a crowd-pleaser … that being said, I LOVE THEM!” is a sentence that has been stuck in my head all summer.

It’s the beginning of a review by an internet commenter whom I do not know but who gave five stars to a pair of black polka-dot smocked bloomer shorts by Anthropologie. Her review was titled “A Lovely Surprise.” When I began my bubble hem research earlier in the season, her words were the first thing that popped up, and I’ve thought about them often.

I think it’s because she was able to correctly and succinctly describe my exact feelings about the silhouette whose popularity has skyrocketed in recent weeks. There is just something funny about bubble hems and the way they, well, bubble up around your thighs. They’re vaguely diaperlike in that sense, which is why they aren’t a crowd-pleaser. Instead, they’re something either you get or you don’t. But if you do get them, then you don’t care at all if other people do. Somehow, they inspire an all-in kind of attitude, unlike other more out-there garments, like a pair of one-legged pants, which might make you apprehensive or nervous. Whatever it is, bubble-hemmed anything makes me feel giddy.

And they make everyone else feel giddy too, apparently. Since the beginning of last year, the bubble look has bubbled up on a handful of runways, from a pair of balloon bloomers at Jacquemus’s Fall 2023 show, to the puffed-out miniskirt Miu Miu models wore with polo tops for Spring 2024, to a more experimental ruched two-tiered bubble skirt at Louis Vuitton’s Cruise 2025 collection. It wasn’t until earlier this summer, though, that I started to see girls in New York float down the streets in pieces like Paloma Wool’s globo skirt, looking as airy and ethereal as a lost birthday party blowup. Celebrities like Rosalía and Kylie Jenner love the look as well.

It was bound to happen. Bubble hems were a cornerstone of the 2000s aesthetic, a look still going strong amongst Gen Z, which has somehow been able to resurrect every trend from that era and make it feel a bit different from how it originated. I remember wearing the look a decade ago but overaccessorizing it with too many blinged-out accessories and T-shirts with too much going on. The brands that are making the bubble hem popular now—like All In, with its spring polonaise skirt; or Blondita, with its mini plaid bubble skirt; or Paloma Wool, with the aforementioned Rosalía-approved globo hem skirts and dresses—are making it feel diaphanous and dreamy, like something a fairy would float past you wearing. It almost doesn’t even feel nostalgic anymore, but like a look that didn’t exist at all, but that we all dreamed up into reality.

And for that reason, it’s the perfect look for 2024. It’s a step away from the skintight low-rise jeans look of that ’00s era that is still trending, but it’s far more flowy and free. We live in a tense, unprecedented time, when it is almost always—both physically and mentally—impossible to let loose. And so it makes sense that we would all gravitate toward clothing that lets us do that, even if only for a second.

This article first appeared in harpersbazaar.com in August 2024. 

Lead image: Jacquemus / Foc Kan / Louis Vuitton 

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