Ooze is Honest
Ephemerality is in vogue, and it comes in the form of stinky fragrances and foamy fits.
Ahead of a forthcoming piece on “poopy” perfumes I wrote for a beloved blog (not this one, lol) (will post when it’s out!), I want to share my thoughts on why the next bastion of reactionary style will be gloopy, stinky, and oozing.
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Though there will likely always be a facade of appreciation for Barbie-like “perfection” when it comes to attractive women, the trend cycle has now pulled us toward the abject. Trend forecaster and celebrity fashion writer
of I <3 Mess and the Review of Mess has been mentioning for months that gloopy materials like foam and slime are beginning to be incorporated into ad-hoc social media Looks and it’s only a matter of time before we start seeing them on the red carpet. As per Emily: “Why is no one dabbling in the wild world of foam? Where are the bubbles, the Gak, the Play-Doh, the Ali Larter Varsity Blues whip cream bikini???” Slime is tactile, it resists containment, slipping through fingers and refusing hard-edged objectification, a welcome reprieve from the societal obsession with “optimization” and algorithmic compression.
Perhaps the most literal example of high-fashion goo as of late has been Coperni’s SS23 Paris Fashion Week show that featured Bella Hadid sprayed live on the runway with Fabrican, a liquid material that solidifies into a wearable dress. While the final product was sleek, the real spectacle was the act itself: moist, misty, molding to Hadid’s curves.
Ooze is honest: it defies the curated, hyper-controlled aesthetics that dominate digital life. It's unfiltered, unpredictable, and physical in a way that resists the airbrushed illusions of perfection we’re constantly sold. You can't fully control how slime moves, how sweat stains, how a crotch leaks. These are slow-toppling cairns of vitality, of having a body that functions beyond the moments captured in mirror fit pics and on red carpets. It’s a different level of effort to freeze-frame a gooey, slimy look into something commodifiable. You’ll find it resists: it curdles, melts, separates. This might be one of the last bastions of a look being genuinely impossible to replicate, irrefutably personalized not only to its wearer, but to each second in time it’s worn. In a world where so much of identity is flattened into slick avatars and filtered images, ooze asserts: this is not a simulation. It calls attention to the visceral parts of being human that can’t be fully branded or beautified. It’s the opposite of the clean lines of an app interface or the sterile aesthetics of influencer minimalism. Ooze doesn’t lie, it leaks.
However, for better or worse (I’m not a fan of AI in general, so I’ll say worse), the machine is close to catching up: even AI fashion renderings on platforms like Instagram are embracing a pseudo-organic slime aesthetic. Accounts that blend fashion and machine learning, like Nusi Quero’s above, often showcase garments that melt into skin, erupt with bubbles, or look like they’ve been extruded from a goo gun.
Not to fear, though: more grounded, less techy slime content is still huge, and it’s evolving too, with accounts like Peachybbies (above) serving para-fetish content up to millions of rapt followers.
Another high-fashion deployment of goo comes in the form of Pat McGrath’s recent release of the GLASS 001 Artistry Mask as featured on last year’s Maison Margiela SS24 Couture runway. This might seem like the zenith of the “clean” beauty trend, the natural conclusion of an obsession with “glass skin,” but a large percentage of the goo’s appeal, as demonstrated on TikTok by makeup artists like Meicrosoft, is the gnarly footage of its removal: sheaves of second skin peel, then crumble. Visions may be avoided of a corpse’s face in the initial phases of rot.
On a similar note, “BBL smell” has become a widely-known phenomenon in just the past few months. A recently mainstreamed phrase, it names the strange odor, tinged with decay, said to waft off the healing bodies of people who’ve undergone Brazilian Butt Lifts. It’s a side effect, a marker of recovery—but increasingly, it’s also a meme, a phenomenon, and perhaps, inevitably, a flex. A coping mechanism is bound to emerge that sees Baddies at Large adapting the stench as a positive element of their look, a putrid badge of honor. After all, what better way to reckon with the physical risks of a fleeting trend than to make the fallout part of the fantasy?
Berlin-based brand Namilia has long played with abjection as it relates to sexuality, especially aesthetics rooted in kink. Their recent runway collections feature slimy textures, bodily prints (think vulvas, as in the purse above [$165], and surgical scars), and medical tubes integrated into garments.
We’re living in the shadow of COVID-riddled years defined by sanitization both figurative and literal, and the fantasy of smooth, untouched surfaces is beginning to blister and burst. Soon, the body will be allowed to ooze, skin will be deemed “greasy,” not “glassy,” and bawdy smells (stay tuned for my in-depth piece on this!) will be accentuated rather than tamed. Whether to re-eroticize a life streamlined into oblivion, play with kink in public, or normalize the stinky side effects of a procedure done in the name of sexual presentation, there has never been a better time to get gross.
Thanks for gooping it up with me today!
<3 ESK
Ooh, goopy fun! I would totally do one of those masks.