Fashion trends can be hard to trace back to their origins, but for Aliyah Bah, the creator of Aliyahcore, the history is all in the name. Aliyahcore is a style trend that has been circulating on TikTok over the past year, and it all started with Aliyah’s eccentric pink looks. She took influencing to a new level when she spearheaded a movement of people dressing exactly like her.
Similar to many popular creators on the app, Aliyah first started posting during lockdown due to boredom. “I was just in the house doing nothing all day and thought I’ve got to do something with my life,” she explains. “But when I first started TikTok, I wasn’t even on the fashion stuff. But then when I started posting the clothes I would wear people would ask me ‘where’s this from?’ ‘Where’s that from?’ And then I started focusing mostly on fashion.” What started as simply posting outfits of the day turned into thousands of her followers recreating her looks – currently the Aliyahcore hashtag on Tiktok has over 207 million views and is flooded with people’s best attempts at dressing in her style.
Now 2.6 million followers later, Bah has gone from living what you could describe as an average student life in Atlanta, to walking Mowalola’s AW23 show in London and styling the likes of Rico Nasty, Lizzo, and Dazed 100 musician Ayra Starr in her signature style. Hoping to continue into design and styling, earlier this year Bah dropped her first collab with indie brand Oceandeep with two ‘Aliyahcore’ oversized fluffy boots.
Below Aliyah spoke to us about how she got her start on social media, Aliyahcore, and freeing herself from other people’s opinions about her style.
I grew up in Atlanta, Georgia and I am a fashion influencer. I started getting into clothing more in middle school and high school. I’ve always been a DIY girl, from watching YouTube channels and making my own stuff to going to school and wearing super eccentric outfits. I used to get made fun of too but it was all trial and error, just finding out what I really wanted my style to be. And then during quarantine, I started being a content creator. I made Aliyahcore last year, but I’ve always been like this, so I just named it Aliyahcore and started going from there.
Aliyah Bah: My gosh, my earliest memory of fashion was in middle school. I would make these bows out of duct tape and I used to give them to my family and stuff. I remember watching YouTube videos and making them from scratch and I would mess them up and I would have to start over again. I think that’s my earliest memory of fashion, just DIY.
Aliyah Bah: Honestly, I don’t want to seem like the type to say I don’t have any fashion inspirations but I feel like I take more from different fashion subsets or different fashion cultures rather than the big people if that makes sense. So I can’t really name a person specifically.
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