Your entire belly is trending right now

Forget under boob, this year fashion’s favourite erogenous zone is your gut. Elongated bare midriffs styled with low-rise anything is set to be the look of the summer. If you had the foresight to keep your Y2K low-rise jeans in case the trend had an unexpected revival, we’re seriously impressed. Although we doubt you did because it was a traumatic time for almost all of us. Unless heroin chic occurred naturally in your chromosomes, low-rise anything was a body confidence nightmare. Body positivity wasn’t a thing back in the Noughties - at least in the mainstream. The Fat Liberation Movement created by Black women and femmes in the 1960s was the blueprint for the (often whitewashed) bodyposi community we know of today. But back in the Aughts? A time where the words ‘nothing tastes as good as skinny feels’ are printed with zero qualms? Absolutely not.

And so if you didn’t fit the prepubescent body ideal of the time then the return of low-rise living probably isn’t filling you with joy. May we politely suggest you take your slightly jaded glasses off for a second and reassess? Low-rise through a diet culture lens is objectively awful. Low-rise in 2022, with your encyclopaedic knowledge about body positivity and social conditioning is a celebration. A do over for your 15 year old self. See it as putting into practice everything you’ve learned about body positivity and healing over the years. The final test.

But did the designer’s pass? If it’s a do-over for you, it’s definitely a do-over for them. With the lack of body diversity on the runway, the opportunity for labels to showcase the midriff trend on different body types to prove, once and for all, that they’d changed was obvious. So obvious that they’d be stupid to pass over such a big opportunity for redemption, right? … Right?! Some designer’s like Poster Girl passed with flying colours whilst others such as Miu Miu must try harder. This deepdive into Y2K style is all fun and games until the bad vibes of the past are ignored and become a major elephant in the room. Mini tees, flip phones and Lizzie McGuire? *heart eyes* The celebration of a very specific, ultra thin body type? No thank you. The midriff trend would feel a lot more forward-thinking if designers repurposed it for 2022 and beyond. Fatphobia is no longer mainstream, body liberation is.

Back to the bellies. Whether you’ve got an innie or an outie, washboard abs, a c-section scar or joyfully take up more space, this trend is for you. Let’s ignore the boring cookie cutter model line-ups for a moment and focus on the clothes. The clothes! At Miu Miu, midriffs were elongated to the extreme. Mini skirts morphed into belted bandeau tops and work shirts were cropped to an inch of their life so that no business woman, from that point on, would be seen dead at the office without a serious dose of under boob. Miuccia Prada made post-pandemic workwear her own by throwing out the rule book one viciously cropped separate at a time.

Poster Girl did us proud at the label’s LFW debut showcasing it’s signature candy coloured shapewear on a variety of different body shapes. Made from a super-stretch yarn that fits sizes 6-18, the brand is proof that you can be highly successful and favoured by celebrities such as Dua Lipa and Kylie Jenner without erasing bigger bodies from the equation. We audibly squealed when we saw the halterneck dresses complete with cutout hearts at the midriff and matching gloves. Unexpected cutouts were expected and the genius design duo, Francesca Capper and Natasha Somerville, delivered them in bucket loads on a variety of bodies.

In the front row, Rihanna’s pregnancy style was the one to beat. From Dior to Gucci, the singer celebrated her growing bump by making it the star of the show. Through sheer lingerie dresses to super cropped tops worn with oversized fur coats, she answered the prayers of pregnant people everywhere. Maybe, just maybe, maternity brands will open their eyes and finally fill that gap in the market. If Rih-Rih can’t make it happen, who can?

She breathed designer Maryam Nassir Zadeh’s words, *‘it feels sacred, the belly’*, into life and we can’t wait to follow suit and honour our own.

If the idea of exposed midriff still gives you a stomach ache, fair enough. You may have forgiven Paris, Lindsey and Britney but you haven’t forgotten. The memory of this dark time runs deep and, for most millennials, the body keeps the score. Luckily, we do have the power to change how we think and feel about ourselves. We can let go of our fraught emotional history with these vessels we live life in. Today, we still have Paris and Britney (she’s finally free!) but we also gained new names. Models like Enam Asiama and Paloma Elsesser, actress Barbie Ferreira, needs-no-introduction-but-I’ll-do-it-anyway singer Lizzo and YouTuber Maddie Dragsbaek to name just a few. We have people that look exactly like us and people who look nothing like us but the point is that we’re slowly reprogramming our brains to see beauty in every body even, by some small miracle, ourselves. It’s nowhere near perfect but compared to, say, 2005 we’ll take it.