The Gap

Lara Stone has a gap between her front teeth. So do a bunch of other famous women—Ashley Smith, Jessica Hart, others you see in magazines. For a long time, gaps were the opposite of fashionable. They were orthodontic problems, things you paid money to fix. The dream was perfect alignment, smooth and featureless. But somewhere in the 2010s that flipped. The gap became interesting instead of broken.

I don’t quite remember when it happened. Gradually, the way these things do. Maybe it was just saturation—everyone had the same perfect teeth, so imperfection started looking better. Or maybe it was something deeper, a small rebellion against the idea that you should optimize yourself into smoothness. Whatever it was, girls started keeping their gaps. Some had them created. Someone decided their tooth gap wasn’t a flaw to fix but a feature to keep.

There’s something I respect about that decision. Not the gap itself—that’s just a detail. But what it means. Most of us learn early to see ourselves as problems: too fat, too crooked, too wrong in some way. You catalog your flaws and pay money and try to erase them. A gap refuses that. It says: I’m keeping this. This is mine. This is interesting because it’s not what you’d design if you were optimizing for perfection.

That’s a different way of living in your own face. Maybe it doesn’t matter that much. But there’s something genuinely subversive in it, even if it’s just fashion, even if it’s temporary. Even if in five years everyone’s back to wanting straight teeth and the gap is just a forgotten moment when things were different.