It’s the story of our clothes that matters — not their aesthetics.
It’s February 2025 and Afghan coats are everywhere. For every black puffer jacket worn under the cold, white sky of London, there is a long, brown sheepskin coat with a fluffy trim. New York is similar; my friend describes the current fashion of the Lower East Side as looking more akin to the wardrobes of A Complete Unknown than the bandage dresses of Anora. Come summer, both sides of the Atlantic will shed their flared jeans for white prairie skirts and fitted turtlenecks for bohemian blouses.
The jury is in: boho chic is back. Instagram fashion bible Databutmakeitfashion predicts the style will be a definitive trend for the year, an assured assumption already declared by Vogue. Trendier labels such as Superdry and Urban Outfitters are already cashing in, the mannequins of their storefronts draped in white lace dresses and suede fringe. On the other end of spectrum, luxury brands are being championed by It girls like Daisy Edgar Jones, styled to exquisite boho extremes in thin flouncy fabrics and wooden clogs. For years, the unofficial uniform of rural summer festivals and cigarette-rolling students was bohemian dressing. Now it is once more part of the fibre of modern street dressing in a way not seen since the last iteration of Boho Chic in the noughties led by the likes of Edgar Jones’ foremothers Sienna Miller and Kate Moss.
“...Runway brands like Chloe and Isabel Marant are both boho with a Parisian edge that extends to the everyday audience,” stylist Lauren Glazer tells me. “Even this Asos order I’ve put through has been directly inspired by Chloe’s boho movement.”
Perhaps the writing was always on the lava lamp lit walls. Glazer attributes the resurgence of bohemian dressing to the popularity of the 2023 series Daisy Jones and the Six, which chronicles a rock band in the early 1970s. The impact was somewhat immediate: TikTok and Instagram surged in mood boards and ‘get the look’ collages, with pieces like cowboy boots and high-rise flared jeans upticking in sales. And two years prior, Taylor Swift’s Folklore album, celebrated as a definitive sound of mandated lockdowns, ushered in prairie inspired fashion that reflected not just her album cover and music videos, but the slower, folkier sound of her new direction. Suddenly, peasant blouses and flowing white skirts, traditionally associated with European bohemia and the scene’s romanticism with rural living, were worn by young people in TikToks dancing in fields of flowers in homage to the album. This association between bohemian dressing and an album by the world’s biggest popstar has proven stubborn. “RIP Joan Baez,” someone tweeted a week ago after seeing the aforementioned Bob Dylan biopic. “You would’ve loved Folklore.”
Baez - who is still very much alive - with her paisley prints and modest white dresses, was more a reflection of the 1960s-bohemian dressing rather than a trend-setter in her own right. And when compared to Hunter S. Thompson’s vivid 1967 gonzo piece of his trip to Haight-Ashbury, the San Francisco neighbourhood that became something of a hippie headquarters throughout the decade, Baez’s dress seems almost more art teacher than revolutionary radical.
“...He will be wearing a long Buddhist robe or a Sioux Indian costume,” Thompson wrote of a performer at a bar on Haight Street. “There will also be a hairy blond fellow wearing a Black Bart cowboy hat and a spangled jacket… Next to the drummer will be a dazed-looking girl wearing a blouse (but no bra) and a plastic mini skirt.” Today a look more associated with Coachella than commune, what was then a means of dressing to express dissatisfaction – if not total disassociation – with mainstream American society is in 2025 a series of outfits that would still be worn, if not significantly dialled down.
A direct influence from the influx of Indian music and religion that circulated across the 1960s counter-culture, the period saw bohemian dressing encompass kaftans and Moccasin boots, turquoise jewellery and stacks of bangles. Today, Glazer says, boho chic is something “people like dipping into… Some people may want a cowboy boot or a suede fringed jacket. Something that can be brought into daily lives”, without whole-heartedly embracing the look. Even the original boho chic aesthetic of the noughties was a look associated with music festivals and hedonistic party girls; now even “corporate girls”, Glazer points out, are buying “pieces like tote bags and ruffled shirts”.
Sixty years ago, this means of dressing was accompanied with some degree of a lifestyle shift; this was an era that saw young Western people embrace Indian practices like transcendental meditation and, on the more radical side, commune living as described by Thompson. Cowboy styles and reclamations of the American flag was a physical display of anti-government protest; even the long hair sported by hippie men was a direct rebellion against the military crop mandatory for those drafted to the Vietnam war. The statement was assured. Out were the rigid structures of shirts and form-fitting skirts, designed to make young people look as much like their parents in their assumed path to grow up to be like them. In its place was a cacophony of symbols repurposing a new ideology and political mandate of the fight against international war, traditional norms, and an embrace of a peace and love ethos.
In 2025, wearing an Afghan coat does not indicate a stance on Middle Eastern politics, but perhaps a girl crush on Kate Hudson’s character in Almost Famous. Can bohemian dressing be revolutionary again? Can any style of dressing, in today’s culture of micro-trends and fast fashion, mean anything beyond personal aesthetic? Last month, Kanye West appeared on the red carpet with an utterly naked Bianca Censori. Far from ‘breaking the internet’ in the vein of Kim Kardashian’s nude photoshoot for Paper magazine a decade ago, the appearance was, for the most part, met with half-hearted disdain, with most of the discussion revolving around her facial expression. Are we simply beyond any article of clothing – or lack thereof – really meaning anything?
“I think dressing can be an intentional, deeply spiritual thing,” Anushka Shah, founder and designer of sustainable bohemian brand Casa Nushki, says. With an emphasis on organically made and sustainably produced products, her store works with partners in Morocco and Latin America to create hippie style pieces inspired by these countries for today’s boho chic dressers. She acknowledges that today fast fashion “can copy literally anything” so it is “very hard for small brands to compete”, but does celebrate a positive impact of globalisation within a fashion aesthetic so reliant upon other countries’ cultures. “It has always been done by women and the artisans I work with have mentioned it being meditative, a way for them to feel connected to their culture and each other.”
“With South American textiles… They were explaining to my friend in Peru the symbols within the tapestries. Mother Earth, it’s all very connected.” Shah and I discuss the current zeitgeist of young people travelling through Central and South America in a manner not dissimilar to the rush to India and Morocco in the 1960s. “The floral embroidery I work with in Oaxaca”, for example, “is a direct impression of the surrounding nature of the Sierra Norte.”
Far from being the first American woman to pick up a guitar and sing ballads about love, Swift’s Folklore album wasn’t necessarily pioneering in its sound. What did resonate so much with her audience to trigger a wave of field-running, flowing-skirt-dressing young people was that she broke with her former pop sound to express a sound more yearningly nostalgic, romantically pastoral, at a time we were all found ourselves introspectively gazing from within the confounds of lockdown.
And perhaps the same can be said about the return of boho chic dressing. Whether explicitly sourcing pieces from a sustainable brand, or merely what we select upon the mannequins of our malls; a singular piece within the day’s outfit or an explicit influence upon an entire wardrobe; it is, perhaps, no mere coincidence we are once again turning to the styles that so define a longing for a freer, less turbulent life in a time of great national and international tension.
Are we all looking for something more romantic? Some type of escapism, an affinity for another time – or even other cultures – that can be reflected within the clothes we wear, without radically compromising our modern lifestyles? “I think bohemian dressing is back because people are on a quest for freedom and to live in a way that feels like it holds that,” Shah says.
For an aesthetic that transcends all avenues of clothes-making, from luxury fashion houses to fast fashion brands to independent labels such as Shah’s Casa Nushki, there’s even an argument to be made that in 2025, the bohemian ethos is centred less what the clothes look like but how they are made. Many pieces of this shabby and unkempt aesthetic are too, perhaps, ‘out there’ for fast fashion design, with an emphasis on the second hand; I am not the first to note our generation’s celebration of the hustle to source such pieces with genuine excitement. Go to any smoking area in London or New York and you’ll find a girl who will earnestly tell you a jacket or a belt was bought in a charity shop, a market abroad, or even – usually delivered with the most satisfaction – their mom’s. If the symbols of peace and flowers were sixty years ago a wearable manifestation of connecting with the earth, today the origin of the clothes themselves assert a desire to save it.
The heart of it, Shah tells me, is “knowing how something is made, the story behind it, the significance of it… Having things that are handmade, with soul, not mass produced.”
Glazer, after a phone call discussing the difference between the integration of boho chic on the high street and bohemian dressing as a wardrobe aesthetic, agrees with Shah. “Look,” she tells me. “You’re either that girl or not.” 🌀
Bea Isaacson is a culture and travel writer based in London.