Girls In Dresses in 2000s YA

Let’s do a YA Rewind and and talk about Girls in Dresses in 2000s YA . Aspirational? Weird? Anti-feminist? What’s the state of Girls in Dresses in YA today?

A photo of a girl on a beach in a red gown looking confused

I was thinking back to the HUGE “girls in dresses” trend in Y2K YA.

Girls in dresses in 2000s ya: WHY?

I mean, didn’t EVERY YA Paranormal Romance of the 2010s have a random girl on a cliff or in the woods wearing a huge prom dress? Standing there looking all angsty with her hair blowing and her dress blowing.

Because … pretty dresses?

And then I’d laugh if the book would somehow work in a prom scene just to make sure there was a dress in the book in the midst of all that falling in love with vampires, saving the world from the Big Bad.

Was it because every 2000s YA Paranormal heroine was … not like other girls?

Let’s look back. Remember these?

The cover of The Selection, The Winner's Curse and Everneath, all pictures of Girls in Dresses from 2000s YA

And of course, these:

In 2012, Publisher’s Weekly was complaining that these covers were overdone!

But STILL in 2017, Epic Reads had a poll on readers’ favorite “girl in dress” covers.

I have mixed feelings about these. One the one hand, they really did capture the FEELINGS of 2000s YA Paranormal Romance. The LONGING. The DANGER.

The Girls in Dresses trend continued into YA Dystopian books and YA Fantasy, which seemed a little more out of place.

Such as in this series. As much as I loved the cover of the first book (WAS that Sarah Maas modeling?)

The glam cover didn’t really fit the character, who was an assassin who just got out of prison.

We all LOVED the covers on this popular YA Fantasy Series, and I wrote a post about how upset readers were when the covers were changed.

but these covers all reference a specific type of female beauty

But, as author Ellen Oh pointed out in a 2012 blog essay, these covers were an idealized version of female beauty. White and thin.

As far back as 2009, YA authors discussed the “whitewashing” of their covers and being told that covers with models of color didn’t sell. Readers were upset a year later when a debut author’s book, which featured a dark-skinned character, got a cover with a light-skinned model.

In the 2020s, even though POC representation in YA and support for authors of color still has a long way to go, we are finally seeing some gorgeous YA Paranormal and Fantasy covers with models of color.

ALL readers should have the chance to read about characters who look like them, and SEE these characters looking beautiful and powerful on the cover.

What are your thoughts about Girls in Dresses? A relic of the past, or a trend that could be brought into the 2020s? Here’s some thoughts from Twitter: