A few weeks back, I got a late-night text from a friend that read, “Please tell me you’re going to write about this,” and linked to an Instagram post about Olivia Rodrigo, who caused a social-media kerfuffle last month by wearing a gauzy, flowered babydoll dress on stage. Reactions ranged from you-go-girl flame emoji to eye-rolling sarcasm to direct accusations of “pedo-baiting.”
I didn’t see anything off-brand about Rodrigo’s choice of outfit. But it’s also easy to see why, at this moment in the United States of Donald Trump, Jeffrey Epstein, and Elon Musk, a getup like Rodrigo’s, with its micro-mini hemline and matching bloomers, would put people’s teeth on edge. Asked to respond to the controversy on The New York Times’ Popcast, Rodrigo didn’t mince words, pointing out that she’s worn much more revealing outfits on stage without getting the same flavor of pushback. The outrage over the babydoll dress “shows how we just, like, really normalize pedophilia,” she said. “You shouldn’t be responsible for some guy sexualizing you when that was never your intention.”
It was gratifying to hear the confidence in Rodrigo’s voice, along with the irritation of someone familiar with the fiction that any young woman who exists in public is forever one outfit away from being stripped of a role-model status they never asked for. But equally important was Rodrigo’s point that the outfit was worn in a specific context and with a nod to the women of an earlier era who inspired her — and who, in their own time, wore similar garments as a way to confront a pedophilic gaze that has existed wherever girls have existed, for as long as they have.
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But the babydoll dress has a much longer and more complex history, one that’s been associated with women’s sartorial freedom as much as it’s reified their cultural infantilization. Its earliest whispers were issued from France’s Directoire era in the 1800s, when gowns with a high waist and long skirts flourished after a period of explosive Rococo maximalism. French designer Paul Poiret looked to this history in the early 20th century when making clothes that didn’t require foundation garments like corsets and petticoats, and that played with novel architectural elements. The babydoll as we know it debuted in the 1940s as a nightgown, its briefness a result of war-rationed fabric. Lingerie designer Sylvia Pedlar made the best of it, designing a flared silhouette that fell loosely from the bust and stopped above the knee.
There’s no getting around the queasy narrative that eventually gave the garment its name: the 1956 Elia Kazan film “Baby Doll,” in which a 19-year-old woman, waiting until she turns 20 to consummate her marriage to an older man, wears an itty-bitty nightgown and, well, sleeps in a crib. But the babydoll bounced back again and again in the coming decades, inspiring the fashion innovations of Cristobal Balenciaga (who adapted the silhouette in the late 1950s when he designed a short, voluminous trapeze dress) and the era-defining designers of the Mod 1960s like Mary Quant and Biba (who streamlined the style to be less Shirley Temple and more Youthquake, with shortened hemlines and A-line shapes that looked dramatic hanging off stick-thin models).
Peak Babydoll arrived in the 1990s, when alternative culture broke through to the mainstream, feminist movements reclaimed the word “girl,” and fashion magazines and mail-order retailers started speaking to teen girls in their own language. Short, girlish dresses were everywhere in the early ’90s, but surveys of the era’s vintage-fashion icons often elide meaningful differences in style and statement. Riot Grrrl bands, for instance, tended toward twee, Mod-style dresses whose clean-lined primness offered maximum contrast to their raw-throated punk fury.
Then there was the so-called Kinderwhore genre, far too flippantly named by Melody Maker journalist Everett True and the source of one of rock’s most sustained feuds: Both Hole’s Courtney Love and Babes in Toyland’s Kat Bjelland claimed to be the first to perform in vintage, threadbare dresses with Peter Pan collars and puff sleeves, which they accessorized with knee socks and Mary Janes. Either way, the onetime roommates and bandmates were icons of a deliberately discomfiting broken-doll aesthetic of smudged eyes, smeared lipstick and plastic girls’ barrettes clipped to hanks of bleached-out hair.
(Ron Davis/Getty Images) Courtney Love
Neither woman had any patience for mealy-mouthed explanations. The Cindy Sherman photo of an abandoned, naked doll on the cover of Babes’ album “Fontanelle” felt like menacing punctuation: Pretty wasn’t the point; confrontation was. You get off on little girls, sicko? F*ck you. Love used her suddenly massive platform to emphasize that her muse wasn’t Shirley Temple or even “Baby Doll”’s Carroll Baker, but the grotesque titular character of “Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?”
The friend who texted me about Rodrigo’s babydoll dress wasn’t just making light conversation; she’s someone I’ve known since we were both teens and all too aware that there’s very little a girl can wear to stop men from looking hungrily at her. As with any assertion about a generation, this isn’t true across the board, but Gen X women had a uniquely fraught understanding of who we were allowed to be. On the one hand, we were the kids weaned on “Free to Be You and Me,” whose toys were unisex and whose right to play sports was newly enshrined, growing up in a time when the parameters of what girls could be and do were more expansive than ever. On the other hand, it was also a time when the way grown men interacted with young women was as predatory as it had ever been, and, in contrast to the present, most adults weren’t particularly interested in acknowledging it, much less calling it out. Pop culture, of course, was fine with that for the most part: Both the joke and the justification of Woody Allen’s “Manhattan” avatar was that his 16-year-old girlfriend (Mariel Hemingway) is so much more emotionally mature than he is.
My friend and I were weedy tomboys who wore our brother’s hand-me-down corduroys and sweatshirts, climbed trees, and snuck cigarettes into movie matinees when you could still smoke indoors. As teens, we saw one another sporadically, but at some point it became clear that we were using clothes to hide in very similar ways. At a time when the two prevailing modes of girls’ fashion were old-fashioned Laura Ashley and new-wave Cyndi Lauper, our shared aesthetic was, in retrospect, solidly and inadvertently pre-grunge: baggy jeans and overalls, oversized sweaters and T-shirts, and bulky duffel coats.
I had only one pressing fashion concern at the time: deflecting male attention as much as possible. It was a largely unconscious reaction to an inappropriate father who had a habit of looking me up and down, commenting on my body and those of other women and girls in ways that made me want as many layers of clothing as possible between us. If it was less than two sizes too large, I wasn’t putting it on; if I wore a skirt, it was with jeans underneath it. My friend, who wore bulky sweaters year-round because she was always cold, was in the nascent stages of what became anorexia and then bulimia. Neither of us knew what the other one was dealing with until years later, when, as adults, we were able to laugh grimly over our late arrival to a world of clothes that fit.
(Gotham/GC Images/Getty Images) Robin Thede
Secretly, though, I loved fashion. My chic, birdlike mother, at one time a department-store buyer, had a wall-sized closet whose mirrored doors slid back to reveal pieces that I would love to have now: Black suede jeans, Norma Kamali knits, wide-collared shirtdresses in wild prints. When I was 17, I started an internship at the now-storied Sassy magazine, where I hoped, also secretly, that I might glean some wardrobe intel from the staff of cool twentysomething women. It was there that I first saw a dress that made me rethink girl clothes: It was a short, sacklike rectangle of crinkly black material, printed with ditsy flowers, that made me pause: I could wear something like that.
I got to work, pawing through my mother’s closet before asking if I could alter a navy trapeze-style dress she no longer wore; she was so thrilled by my interest that she probably would have handed over the minidress she got married in if I’d asked. I stayed up late hemming the navy dress by hand and wore it later that week to the Sassy office with a pair of men’s oxfords. One of the other interns — the coolest of cool girls, who went on to cofound one of the decade’s defining fashion labels — took in the outfit, bestowing it an affirming nod before going on to make a withering remark about my overgrown hair. It was a start.
The third category of ’90s babydoll dresses weren’t Mod/punk and weren’t Kinderwhore. They felt kicky and new, with shallow, scooped necks that could fit a range of bustlines without a show of cleavage; their Empire waistlines were more like delineating seams that hit somewhere at the ribcage. The skirts were tiered or flared or just kind of hanging there roomily, and though they stopped a few inches above the knee, wearing black bike shorts was a fail-safe, a Spandex barrier against air vents, strong winds, and creeps of all kinds.
(Kevin Winter/GA/The Hollywood Reporter via Getty Images) Chloë Sevigny
I eventually bought a proper babydoll dress and styled it like countless other women on the streets of New York, topped with a denim jacket or mohair grandpa cardigan, with Doc Martins or motorcycle boots below. Toughening up the dress made it feel almost like armor: Because it concealed more than it showed, it made me feel willing to be seen for the first time in years. There is no garment powerful enough to keep a NYC catcaller from doing his thing, but I strode to Sassy’s Times Square offices and my retail job on lower Broadway with something that approached confidence.
“To be cringe about it, the ’90s babydoll dress wasn’t designed for the male gaze,” says my friend Rachel, a keen observer of Gen X fashion then and now. Which isn’t to say the babydoll served as man repellent (my most enthusiastically heterosexual friend had a closet full of them), but, as with so much fashion past and present, it spoke primarily to women. A 1992 fashion spread in Sassy that featured Chloë Sevigny, scouted right off the street by an editor, captured the magic: In it, she’s wearing bright-red tights, John Fluevog lace-up boots, and a dress resembling a scaled-down circus tent. She’s gorgeous, of course — she’s Chloe Sevigny, and she knows it — but she’s not dressed for men.
I rarely talk or write about my experience as a sexualized child, but the way it informed my feelings about fashion is why I’m not willing to surrender the babydoll dress wholesale to a culture that has never needed encouragement to leer at underage women. Babydoll dresses aren’t the reason that the full-scale disempowerment of women and girls sits atop a checklist of government priorities. Babydoll dresses don’t explain the suppression of the Epstein Files. Babydoll dresses aren’t the reason that tech billionaires spend their time devising tools for the express purpose of violating the consent of girls on the internet. It may seem like a good time to 86 the babydoll dress, but I’d argue that it’s an even better time to refuse.
