Would you let bleach get to your head?

Megan Hotchkiss’ Junior Year Collection for CCS Fashion Design

There is something wonderfully unhinged about naming a fashion collection You Let All That Bleach Get to Your Head. It sounds like an insult shouted across a high-school bathroom, which makes it a strangely perfect title for a collection about prom, femininity and the increasingly surreal fantasy of becoming the “perfect girl.”
For her junior-year collection at the College for Creative Studies, Megan Hotchkiss takes the familiar language of prom and pushes it somewhere much stranger. The dresses feel inflated, exaggerated and almost edible, with delicate forms and glossy surfaces that sit somewhere between a teenage dream and a piece of candy left too long under a heat lamp. And this is where Hotchkiss taps into something that seems to be happening far beyond fashion right now: we seem to have developed an obsession with things that look like glass, sugar and candy.

There is a particular kind of texture that keeps appearing in contemporary art, fashion and design:
translucent, inflated, glossy, melted, gummy, almost edible. Things look like they should be hard but seem soft; soft but somehow glass-like. Surfaces resemble boiled sugar, jelly, resin, frosting or blown glass. It is an aesthetic that makes objects feel simultaneously precious and completely artificial. Hotchkiss' collection fits beautifully into that strange visual appetite. The appeal is partly tactile. You can almost imagine what these pieces would feel like: sticky, smooth, inflated, slightly rubbery. They have the visual language of candy without necessarily looking childish. Instead, the sweetness becomes slightly uncanny.

Which feels particularly appropriate for a collection about prom.

Prom already exists in this strange space between reality and fantasy. It is a night where teenagers are encouraged to become exaggerated versions of themselves: the princess, the beauty queen, the glamorous woman. Hair is bleached, faces are perfected, dresses are transformed into enormous constructions. Everything is designed to look better than everyday life.
Hotchkiss takes that artificiality and makes it physical. The collection's materials and exaggerated forms make femininity feel almost manufactured, as though the perfect prom girl has been dipped in sugar, inflated and put under glass. There is something seductive about it, but also something slightly grotesque. And perhaps that is why these candy-like textures feel so right at the moment. We seem increasingly drawn to objects that sit between cute and unsettling, precious and disposable, organic and synthetic.

It is almost as though we want everything to look touchable.

Hotchkiss' work takes that impulse somewhere particularly feminine. The sweetness isn't simply decorative; it becomes part of the collection's commentary on the construction of girlhood. The crown, the exaggerated silhouettes, the beauty rituals and the sugary surfaces all belong to the same fantasy. It is beautiful precisely because it is so obviously artificial. And then there is the title again: You Let All That Bleach Get to Your Head. It turns the whole thing into a joke. You wanted the perfect hair, the perfect dress, the perfect night, the perfect version of yourself — and eventually the fantasy became so convincing that you started living inside it. The collection therefore doesn't reject sweetness. It overdoses on it. That is what makes it feel so contemporary. Rather than simply making another pretty collection about femininity, Hotchkiss seems to understand that the interesting thing about pretty right now is when it becomes excessive enough to feel almost surreal.

A little more sugar. A little more shine. A little more plastic. A little more princess.

Until eventually, you can't tell whether you're looking at a prom dress, a piece of candy, a sculpture or something that might melt in your hand.