Corsets, Capes and Crinolines: How Theatre Costuming Is Inspiring Street Style

Words: Macy Berendsen

Somewhere between Bridgerton, balletcore and corsets as going-out tops, it’s clear that street style is becoming theatrical. Opera gloves, capes, colourful wigs and crinolines are all being worn not just onstage, but outside your apartment window. It’s not only a revival of 1800s-inspired opera, it’s a deeper cultural shift in how people are collapsing the line between extravagant costumes and everyday wear.

The idea that fashion is performance isn’t new, theorists like Judith Butler have written about how we "perform" identity through clothing. But what feels new is the intentional embrace of costuming in everyday fashion: not trying to look effortlessly cool, but actively looking like you’re stepping onto a stage.

On TikTok, creators label Get Ready With Me and Outfit of the Day videos with “balletcore” and “regencycore,” pairing antique corsets with cargo pants or crinolines with chunky sneakers. The “wrongness” of these juxtapositions is the point – it signals that the wearer knows they are playing with fashion as fantasy. 

After a couple years of Zoom calls with pyjama pants out of shot, people had an urge to wear extravagance and engage in “dopamine dressing” as a way to reclaim public space with joy and energy. It taps into a collective hunger for fantasy and escape – and theatre, with its emphasis on spectacle and transformation, offers the perfect visual language to try and communicate our wants and desires without having to say anything at all. 
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Pop culture helps pave the way by laying a foundation to take inspiration from, such as Netflix’s Bridgerton and Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette, which is perennially clipped on social media. Celebrities' red carpet looks have also embraced theatrical fashion, like Zendaya’s Joan of Arc armour from the Met Gala and Chappell Roan’s Renaissance Grammy look. 

This isn’t the first time street fashion has borrowed from the stage. In the 1970s, David Bowie brought cabaret into rock’s style. Leigh Bowery’s grotesque beauty looks in the 1980s meshed costume with body art. Drag ball culture made fantasy into survival strategies. Each time theatricality in fashion has emerged not just as decoration, but as defiance. It’s a weapon against those who are actively working against fantasy: dressing theatrically is about declaring an aesthetic allegiance, but also about rejecting the rules of minimalism, normcore, or influencer-neutral palettes. By making costuming part of streetwear, people are rejecting minimalist, conforming ideals and instead are celebrating excess and campiness. 

As performer and writer Alok Vaid-Menon notes, the mainstream idea of “realness” is often weaponised against those whose identities don’t conform to traditional beauty ideals. Embracing theatrical fashion becomes a way to assert joy, artifice, and self-determination – rather than fading into the algorithmic beige of “normal” style.

“By making costuming part of streetwear, people are rejecting minimalist, conforming ideals and instead are celebrating excess and campiness.”

For the last decade, the dominant aesthetic in influencer and celebrity fashion has been some form of “aspirational neutralness” – quiet luxury, beige, the Kardashians in skin-tight Skims, Hailey Bieber’s slick buns and glazed nails. This kind of fashion has always depended on invisibility and conformity – the ability to disappear into whiteness, thinness, and wealth. It doesn’t scream, it whispers: I am normal like you. 

The return of theatrical costuming is an aesthetic rebellion against that norm. It's excessive, impractical, unruly. It refuses to flatter the body in traditional ways. It’s about power through exaggeration, not polish. It’s messy, confusing, unrealistic. 

By rejecting pared-down, body-conscious fashion in favour of overt, extravagant costuming, creators like Ivy Thompson (@the_sewlo_artist), Lacey Dalimonte (@laceydalimonte), Wisdom Kaye (@wisdm8) and Zack Pinsent (@pinsent_tailoring) remind us that clothing has always been a site of political meaning. As writer and academic Amelia Jones notes in Unpredictable Temporalities: The Body and Performance in (Art) History, "Performance allows for visibility that resists legibility.”

There’s a reason why authoritarian movements tend to prefer uniforms. Realism, in fashion, is rarely neutral. To dress theatrically in the face of realism – economic realism, political realism, bodily realism – is to refuse compliance, speed and utility. Costumes are slow. They require time and dedication. In an optimised world, theatrical dressing says: I’m here to perform self. Gender expression is under attack, bodily autonomy is being legislated out of existence, and trans people are being demonised for simply appearing in public. What could be more radical than refusing to dress “appropriately”?

The people wearing crinolines on the bus to work and satin gloves to the grocery store aren’t just playing dress-up, they’re actively disrupting expectations about whose bodies are allowed to be visible. They’re reminding the world that fantasy and self-invention are not luxuries – they’re survival tactics. For many queer and trans people, theatrical dressing becomes a form of gender play, not as camouflage, but as amplification. Historical silhouettes can be liberating precisely because they don’t aim to look ‘real.’ Crinolines create space where the body isn’t meant to be sleek or small. Velvet capes and ruffled shirts recall the drama of princes and knights without the confines of masculinity. Costume becomes a toolkit for building a specific fantasy.

Theatre has always been a space for transformation, where rules bend, characters shift, and the impossible becomes real. It makes perfect sense that, in a time where so many of us feel constrained by capitalism, surveillance, and gender policing, people would turn to theatrical dressing not to escape the world, but to try and rewrite it.

Perhaps that's the most powerful thing a costume can do: not only reflect who we are, but imagine who we could be: the most radical thing we can do is refuse to dress for reality.