The Bratz Revival & Nostalgia Dressing

Written and Illustrated by Tui Lou Christie (she/they)

The year is 2006. You’re at a sleepover with your best friends. Mum’s made saveloys and fairy bread. You’ve got some fake sticker earrings on, you’re putting butterfly clips in everyone’s hair, and Bratz: Rock Angelz is playing on VHS on the family TV. Life is good.

It is doubtless that fashion dolls have impact on personal style. The recent promotion for the upcoming Greta Gerwig film Barbie (which I will be attending on its opening screening, dressed for the occasion obviously) has spawned a new variation of hyperfeminine dressing: Barbiecore. All things pink, all things frilly, skirts short and heels high. However, Barbara Roberts isn’t the only fashion doll icon that young people are taking inspiration from.

A smaller player in the fashion doll game, but one who has none the less impacted the younger generation online, is Bratz. Created by Mattel rival MGA, Bratz are teen model magazine moguls with a passion for fashion that hit stores in 2001. Bratz went through its fair share of controversies, like most fashion dolls have to (can we please let girls enjoy stuff?), but still managed to sell incredibly well, grossing $2 billion in sales in their first five years and accounting for 40% of doll sales by 2006.

Bratz dolls came back on the market with special 20-year anniversary dolls in 2021, one year post-COVID. The pandemic gave rise to a new wave of nostalgia-driven entertainment as a form of escapism, taking us back to a pre-COVID time where we lived with a bit less fear and sickness. Rewatching the straight-to-DVD Barbie films makes things seem a bit more possible. Watching a 3-hour deep dive video essay on iCarly or Winx Club makes me forget about the price of eggs in this cost-of-living crisis. The same goes for fashion; baby tees and chunky platform sneakers give me a hit of nostalgia that makes stepping out into a rapidly declining environment slightly more bearable.

Y2K fashion is back in a big way thanks to the 20-year fashion cycle we have been gently trapped in for most of the modern period, a cultural rule that lives on due to the influence of nostalgia. The Y2K and Bratz resurgence in fashion and popular culture is indicative of this. With Bratz, we aren’t just trying to grasp pre-COVID times, but preadult times, when things were simpler. You brought your Cloe doll, and your bestie brought her Yasmin doll. It’s a time when university hadn’t crossed your mind because you were going to be an actress singer popstar with twenty dogs, and not an English major. A time when you were picking which boy from your class to have a crush on that week, and not going through a heartbreak. When you spent your free time wondering if you’re a Sasha or a Jade, and not which flat you’re going to spend your student allowance renting for the next 12 months.

When I was a child, the coolest thing I could think of wasn’t eggs being on sale; it was a super fashionable teen girl with pretty makeup and cool clothes.