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Romance is backIt's a vibe shift — we love love again
Below, we look at how our clutch for realness might be impacting our wardrobes. Or, our Friday night plans at least.
By Hayley Morgan
3 February 2025 · 3 min read
Yes! Romance is back, and it’s asking for your hand like a Victorian ghost with unfinished business. It’s swanning down runways in clouds of tulle, dripping in pearls, and smudging its lipstick on candlelit wine glasses. From Sabrina Carpenter’s soft-focus, lovelorn visuals to Bottega Veneta and Loewe’s dreamy surrealism, the culture is leaning hard into its haute romantic era.
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Aesthetically speaking, we’re not the only ones calling it. Pinterest namechecked all things cherry coded in their 2025 predictions report, and more importantly called a rococo revival — saying everything frilly, ornate, and ultra feminine will flourish. There’s something in their read of ‘Cream Soda Aesthetic’ topping the charts that makes us nostalgic of retro dating — perhaps it’s the Sandy and Danny of it all. In our own forecasting, we’ve spotted a 150% increase in the interest of regencycore over the past year, and we’re not quite sure what to do with data that shows a rise in popularity for both red lipstick and pushup bras (perhaps courtesy of VS’s return?). Are we seeing signals for a bombshell renaissance?
Lots of this data feels reflective of the heart-shaped box that pop music is sitting in today. Sabrina Carpenter’s dreamy, rose-tinted visuals and Lana Del Rey’s nostalgic, melancholic Americana both align with the romantic, opulent vibe sweeping through fashion. Olivia Rodrigo channels heartache through soft, vintage-inspired imagery, while Billie Eilish’s recent embrace of gothic lace and sultry corsets pushes her sound in new, alluring directions. Even Taylor Swift continues to bring red lipstick back into the chat, making it an iconic symbol of her ongoing reinvention. These artists are painting in the same hues as the cultural mood board, where frills, femme energy, and emotions are leading the way.
Beyond music, romantic nostalgia feels so real you could kiss it. Who else’s algorithm is feeding them mini digital cameras that capture life in a whimsical 72dpi? And which bookshelves just got anointed with Bell Hooks’ All About Love: New Visions? And could it be that the cultural push to make romance feel more real has something to do with your new-found fascination with personalised and signature scents? Lean in, love is here.
Fragrance is in
But the shift feels like it could be bigger than just an aesthetic or a bop. After years of ironic detachment, twenty thousand think pieces on ghosting, love bombing, breadcrumbing, orbiting, green-flag-red-flag-beige-flag, trauma bonding and soft boys, mixed with a collective lingering of existential dread, there’s a craving for something softer, more human. Romance isn’t just a moodboard in 2025; it’s a cheeky comeback to a world that’s all left swipes and not enough telling your Pookie she’s looking fire tonight. The lace and frills? Pure chaos energy — whimsy weaponised against the algorithm. Maybe.
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IRL, a surprising number of young people might be trading ‘situationships’ for more ‘real’ relationships — according to Kinsey Institute for Feeld’s 2024 data, 81% of Gen Zers fantasise about monogamous relationships. And, have you noticed everything is a club right now? We’ve got run clubs (which, unsurprisingly, we’re falling in love at), book clubs seem to be fashion’s favourite, and now chess clubs are chomping at the bit to be the next big meeting place. It seems like we really are just looking for someone to match our freak — a rock solid response to this reverberating feeling that tech has us feeling more and more disconnected from the real world.
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In 2023, WGSN wrote, “To cope with mediocrity becoming the norm, youth will find beauty in everyday life moments.” And to us, that’s translating (perhaps more poetically) into this movement, or seeking, of grounding influences that offer stability and authenticity; a reconnecting with structure and purpose found in the intersection of everyday rituals, routine and reality. When viewing that in the light of love — imagining routine with another, sharing the load of life, purpose to another — it just feels… nice.
What do you think? Is love finally having its main character moment in 2025? Over here, we’re truly, madly, deeply screaming “I do!”
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