Welcome back, Dolphin Girl: A dormant ’90s trend comes up for air at Paris Fashion Week

From slip dresses to butterfly clips, it appears our collective passion for reviving ’90s fashion trends knows no bounds.

But there’s one relic of the decade that’s laid dormant for years, seemingly never to resurface – and now, the whiff of its potential renaissance has my inner ‘Dolphin Girl’ doing cartwheels of joy.

On Wednesday, Stella McCartney sent models down the runway at her Paris Fashion Week Spring/Summer 2027 show in tees and dresses featuring the kinds of colourful dolphin prints that were inescapable 30 years ago.

(Trigger alert: these would now be considered ‘vintage’.)

The significance of this will be lost on anyone too young to remember the dolphin hysteria of the mid-’90s. But as someone who lived and breathed it the first time around, these photos have truly stopped me in my tracks.

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Allow me to set the scene: It’s 1996 and, like 73 per cent of the world’s child population, dolphins are your entire personality. (The other 27 per cent are split between horses, fairies and mermaids.)

This isn’t a passing curiosity. It’s an all-absorbing obsession that has not only possessed your mind, but commandeered your entire physical being and surroundings.

Any spare patch of shelf space in your bedroom is home to dolphin statuettes, ornaments and books, while your walls are plastered in posters. If you’re really lucky, dolphins hang from your door frame in the form of beaded curtains.

More importantly, Flipper fashion has infiltrated your wardrobe.

You own at least one dolphin-print T-shirt (sans a Stella McCartney price tag) and perhaps even a batik-style or tie-dye dress. No Dolphin Girl’s outfit was complete without jewellery, either – whether it was a silver wraparound ring or a paua shell pendant hanging from a black cord necklace.

The dolphin obsession largely faded with the early 2000s, and while there have been occasional blips in the years since – the Zara Larsson dolphin meme of 2024 comes to mind – I never expected it to return in any meaningful way, especially in a fashion context.

So, you can understand my stunned delight at seeing dolphin print enjoying a moment in the Paris Fashion Week spotlight.

In these dark times, a splash of ’90s childhood whimsy might be exactly what we all need.

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The best part is you likely don’t need to fork out designer dollars to make it happen – I would bet a strawberry matcha you could browse through the t-shirts at your local op shop and find a relic from the dolphin’s ’90s halcyon days. Failing that, there’s always eBay.

Nostalgia is always fun, but McCartney’s collection – which includes other oceanic motifs like fish, coral and even whale sharks – also carries a timely message about sea life and sustainability.

“We are at war with the oceans, at war with the creatures that live in there. For every fish you eat, countless are thrown back dead,” she told The Guardian after her show.