All products featured on Vogue are independently selected by our editors. However, we may receive compensation from retailers and/or from purchases of products through these links.
When I was in my early teens, I convinced the guy at my local video store to break the rules and rent me Sofia Coppola’s The Virgin Suicides (rated R!). As I fancied myself a brooding young girl not unlike the Lisbon sisters, I became obsessed with the film’s aesthetic. It was the title sequence that really got me, the dreamy home-video footage of a blue cloudy sky with “The Virgin Suicides” scribbled all over it in a million different handwritings.
X content
From then on, my head was permanently in the clouds. As a kid in the early aughts, my cloud obsession was relatively easy to accommodate: I saved up and bought myself a cloud duvet cover from Pottery Barn Kids and—against my mom’s wishes—attempted to hand-paint puffy ones on my ceiling like I was Michelangelo. Though the clouds have long inspired art (think Byron Kim’s sky paintings, or John Constable’s “skying period”), until recently, to get my hands on cloud-y clothing, I had to scour 1stDibs and accrue credit-card debt on something from Moschino’s cloud-print phase from the ’90s.
But with the recent resurgence of 2000s trends more broadly, the print is now everywhere and on everyone. Perhaps emulating Gen Z emulating us, 35-year-olds like me don sheer mesh crop tops that create the illusion of having oil-painted cloud tattoos; and there is no upper age limit for oversized cloud jumpers reminiscent of Sanrio. Even designers like Stella McCartney, Alice and Olivia, and Selkie have recently put out a range of garments that feature clouds.
Sophie Strauss, a “stylist for regular people” who lives in Los Angeles, says she’s been seeing more and more clients gravitate toward the color blue, which is having a moment, along with techniques like tie-dye and shibori that can create a cloud-like pattern. She also thinks clouds are appealing because, despite an association with childhood, they’re anything but one-dimensional.
“Working with clients, something that comes up a lot is people struggling with feeling like their clothes project a one-noteness about them,” Strauss says, pointing out that clouds, while commonly associated with the divine, tend to appear on sexier cuts. The people she dresses are “often drawn to garments that have a little complexity to them, that make them feel layered and dimensional. The push and pull feels truer to us as complicated people who, you know, contain multitudes!"
Scrolling through my social media feeds, I’m taken with clouds not just popping up in fashion, but in branding too, where the look du jour is ethereal and whimsical. This is in large part due to the massively influential aesthetic of Marta Freedman—cofounder and creative director of cool-girl beauty brand Dieux Skin—for whom clouds and angels never lost their appeal. “I think humans are drawn to clouds because they are a mixture of multiple elements—air, water, energy,” Freedman says. ”They’re naturally soothing, ever-changing, and living art.”
Instagram content
Clouds have been such a foundational inspiration to Freedman that she launched Dieux on social media in 2020 using cloud photos she took from an airplane. In a recent campaign for a gel moisturizer called Air Angel, Freedman was inspired by Walter Wick’s 1994 I Spy Fantasy book and built out an immersive sky world complete with—you guessed it—a lot of clouds.
Though their appeal is eternally powerful, the clouds themselves are a bit more vulnerable these days. Global warming has meant that our sky has less and less of them, and we might someday live in a world without clouds altogether. This fact has inspired nonprofits like the Cloud Appreciation Society, which has members in 120 countries, to foster a greater understanding and appreciation of the sky; with a paid membership, you can receive a picture of a beautiful cloud every day via email and generally work to “fight ‘blue-sky thinking’ wherever we find it.” The Cloud Appreciation Society believes that clouds are unfairly maligned, which is a shame, as we’ve never needed clouds—or the experience of gazing up at them—so badly.
“When was the last time most of us got to hang out in the grass and make shapes out of the clouds? At a time where we’re all overworked, stuck inside on computers and phones,” Strauss observes. “If we’re not going to be afforded the time to go look at the clouds outside, it’s nice to look down and at least see them on your pants.” Clouds were always for the dreamers, and as future generations stare up at the sky—or down at their trousers—and dream of a different future, that’s never been more true.