Few items of clothing have sparked more debate in the music industry in recent months than the babydoll.
The floaty, floral and extremely short nightgown has long been seen on female performers, but has been a hot topic on social media recently over the feminine aesthetic of popstars like Olivia Rodrigo and Sabrina Carpenter.
Critics accuse the singers of deliberately styling themselves as childlike and giving ‘Lolita’ vibes.
A closer look shows that the debate is about more than just fashion. It is about how female pop stars are perceived and judged — and why their appearance so often speaks louder than their art.
First things first: Rodrigo’s new album, “You Seem Pretty Sad for a Girl So in Love,” is musically impressive, showcasing her talent for building epic dramatic arcs within pop music. The songs are often piano ballads that swell slowly before releasing into driving rhythms, sometimes quietly underscored by strings.
It doesn’t sound kitsch, but instead calls to mind classic pop in the vein of Elton John, U2, The Cure and Taylor Swift. Rodrigo pulls it off masterfully, for example in the songs “stupid song” and “the cure” — and on many of her classics: “vampire,” “drivers license” and “Can’t Catch Me Now.” On the new album’s track “what’s wrong with me,” The Cure frontman Robert Smith even appears as a guest vocalist.
What is the ‘girlhood’ aesthetic?
But back to her outfits. On Instagram, Rodrigo recently presented her 40 million followers with the cover of “you seem pretty sad for a girl so in love.” It shows her on a swing, dressed in a kind of skimpy school uniform.
For many fans, this is a reference to the currently fashionable pop culture phenomenon of “Girlhood”: a playful, solidarity-driven celebration of femininity, of the kind also staged by filmmaker Sofia Coppola and pop star Sabrina Carpenter.
Coppola popularized this idea of “Girlhood” more than 20 years ago with films such as “The Virgin Suicides.” It refers to a kind of aestheticized staging of girlhood, expressed through nostalgic, playful and hyperfeminine imagery — think bows, pastel tones, glitter, diary aesthetics and analogue photography — while simultaneously symbolizing community, emotionality and self-discovery.
Rodrigo draws on this look in her new music video for the single “drop dead,” in which she dances through Versailles in ruffle shorts.
But Rodrigo, who first became known through Disney productions, was accused of engaging in dangerous “infantilization” and “pedo baiting,” critics said.
Critics charge that she is promoting an image of womanhood that deliberately presents femininity as childlike while simultaneously sexualizing it — thereby reproducing patriarchal fantasies rather than questioning them.
Others, however, say she is being deliberately playful and that Rodrigo is appropriating stereotypical images of “girlishness,” exaggerating them and thereby making them visible.
Why female pop stars are read differently
Carpenter and Rodrigo reveal something about how femininity is negotiated in pop. Female pop stars continue to be defined largely by their appearance, and discussions about them often shift away from their art.
“The problem is not that a woman wears a short, playful dress,” musicologist Penelope Braune told dpa. “The problem is far more a culture that permanently sexualizes female bodies and then holds women responsible for precisely that sexualization.”
Many female artists now consciously play with this objectification: they ironically exaggerate beauty ideals, subvert them — or make their own physicality demonstratively their own subject matter.
This is often described as reclaiming – appropriating an attribution to regain control. But there is also an ambivalence in this, Braune says. The boundary between attribution and self-determination blurs once something is out in the world.
“Pop culture does not exist in a vacuum — that is a fact,” she said. “Behind every look there is an industry, platform logics, attention, marketing and so on, and that is precisely why reclaiming is never entirely free of ambivalence: it can be intended as empowering and yet still circulate within an image economy shaped by the male gaze.”
An outfit rooted in female rock music tradition
Rodrigo herself has said her clothing references a trend from the “Riot Grrrl” movement of the 1990s, as she told Vogue in an interview. Musicians such as Courtney Love deliberately wore girlish outfits at the time, contrasting them with combat boots, angry lyrics and distorted guitars — upending gender stereotypes in the process.
Those musicians are her role models, Rodrigo said in an interview on the New York Times podcast Popcast. The criticism of her babydoll dresses makes her “so upset,” she said.
“I think it shows how we really normalize paedophilia in our culture. And also it’s just this rhetoric that we’re fed as girls since we’re so little, which is like, ‘Don’t wear that because then a man is going to sexualize your body and it’s your fault.’ Like, it’s so weird.”
What matters, Braune said, is “whether we take Olivia Rodrigo seriously as an artist with agency, or whether we immediately assume she is merely reproducing someone else’s — male — fantasies.”
Notably, fellow musicians have been far more supportive of Rodrigo than some anonymous online critics. Robert Smith, for instance, is not only featured on the new album — he had already praised her songs before that and performed alongside her. Courtney Love, also known for wearing babydoll dresses, came to her defence as well.
It is little wonder: Rodrigo has already written a string of catchy hits with impressive chord progressions that draw audibly on the pop and rock history of the 1980s and 1990s — precisely the aesthetic her visual presentation references. The first of those tracks, “All I Want,” was released when she was 16 years old.
For all the debate, Rodrigo and Carpenter remain some of the most successful pop stars in the world today. Rodrigo’s single “drop dead” is her fourth song to enter the Billboard charts at number 1, while tickets for her world tour have long been sold out.
Critics accuse Sabrina Carpenter of deliberately styling herself as childlike. Lucy North/Press Association/dpa
Pop singer Olivia Rodrigo’s new album has been somewhat clouded by a debate over her outfits, which sometimes strongly channel girlhood culture. Ben Birchall/PA Wire/dpa
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