The leaves have fallen, and the cold weather has nipped at our toes, allowing Charlotte Burnett to have a new addition to her closet- a shirt with billowing sleeves, reminding many of the Victorian era. Burnett is one of the many women to believe that puff-sleeves are the newest women’s fashion trend for the 2021 winter season. 

Burnett, a 30-year-old private banker at J.P. Morgan living in New York City, is a faithful subscriber to one of many online fashion services. This Manhattan millennial explained:

“My coworkers and I are on a subscription model where you pay a monthly fee and rent several clothing items or accessories each month. Most of my female coworkers are subscribed to Rent the Runway.”  

Burnett’s experiences with this mainstream subscription fashion service have allowed her to rent many designer fashion styles with puff-sleeves, leading her to believe that they are a powerful design tool for women. She explained how they can transform a woman’s figure into something more. 

“RTR has it’s very own section dedicated to puff-sleeves, and I just recently picked some from my recent orders, because they are a great way to accentuate my shoulders. I have very narrow shoulders, and the puff sleeves help to broaden my shoulders and make them proportional to the rest of my body,” Burnett said. 

In early July, Vogue magazine released an article about how puff-sleeves were the season’s newest must-have, later saying how puff-sleeves have returned season after season, becoming more than just a fleeting trend. Vogue describes puff-sleeves as sleeves that have been shown in many variations, allowing the fashion market to expand on anything with a sleeve. Puff-sleeves can be found in Vogue’s fall/winter 2020 collections, where major fashion brands like Fendi, McQueen, Rodarte, and JW Anderson all included different, creative forms of the puff-sleeve. 

Not only have puff-sleeves made their debut in major brands this cold season, but they seem to have made a splash among young people, too. Kiersten Morris ‘23 shared her take on puff-sleeves as this year’s fall/winter fashion trend for female college students. She said:

“I’ve seen a lot of puff-sleeves around, especially in fast fashion shops where they are always mass-producing trends. Along with puff-sleeves, I’ve seen a lot of puffer jackets, which also goes hand-in-hand with the trend.”

In addition to studying communications and marketing at Loyola, Morris is getting her associates in fashion merchandising at her local community college. To her expertise, Morris thinks that puff-sleeves are cute, but like any other trend, it always gets replaced with something else. Even so, Morris added:

“They’ve still taken over my closet this season.”

Are puff-sleeves the newest trend this season? As the winter prevails, we’ll see if the anticipated hype comes to fruition.

Featured Image courtesy of Ella Arie via Unsplash