When Kat Bjelland wore a babydoll dress in the early 1990s to sing “Swamp Pussy”, it probably wasn’t because she aspired to be seen as a sexy baby. Quite the opposite. The so-called kinderwhore aesthetic of the decade, popularised by riot grrrls like Bjelland, Courtney Love and Allison Wolfe, took items of clothing perceived as innocent – puffy sleeves, Peter Pan collars and pop socks, along with the cornerstone babydoll – and twisted them into symbols of rebellion. They tore up and defaced the fabric, paired outfits with smeared red lipstick and smudged mascara, and wore them while playing what 10 Things I Hate About You famously deemed “angry girl music of the indie rock persuasion”.
It was deliberately provocative and inherently political, smashing hyper-feminine fragility together with brute force as direct comment on the sexual violence that fuelled most of their songwriting. The babydoll – a traditional 1940s nightwear staple – was worn not as a form of enticement, but as a cautionary tale. Removed from its domestic context, tattered and shoved on stage in a cyclone of curdled screams about rotting innards and soured milk, the babydoll became the wayward woman’s uniform, and kinderwhore as a whole communicated a sort of emancipated lunacy; a snapped housewife off her meds and on a rampage.
This subversion of the babydoll was divisive from the start. "I didn’t do the kinderwhore thing because I thought I was so hot..." Courtney Love explained to Rolling Stone in 1994. “It was a What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? thing. My angle was irony.” Still, an adult woman in overtly girlish clothes will always be read as pornographic by some, regardless of intent. Fast forward 32 years, and it seems we’re stuck in the same feedback loop.
On 8 May, Olivia Rodrigo performed an intimate invite-only show in Barcelona, as part of the Spotify Billions Club Live series. By all accounts, the show went down like an Aperol Spritz on a hot Saturday… until photos made their way online. On a stage done up like a dream from Alice in Wonderland, the 23-year-old pop star wore a floral Generation78 babydoll dress, matching bloomers and a pair of black chunky knee-high boots. Her make-up was minimal, her hair unstyled. Instantly, comments sections across every social media platform charged her with crimes against respectability, accusing her of performing the Lolita and infantilising herself for the male gaze. Several comments even referred to her as “pedo bait”.
The vibe of the performance was clearly tailored to mirror that of her upcoming album, you seem pretty sad for a girl so in love. The cover art pictures Rodrigo on a swing in a candy-striped dress – her head flung back, Mary Janes kicking the pale blue sky. In other promotional imagery, she’s seen leaning against a tree in a babydoll, or lying prostrate in the evening grass in thigh-high white pop socks. In the UK, the CD comes with a pink cassette tape and a hand-written letter.
Clearly, the 23-year-old pop star is dipping into riot grrrl among other influences (early 2010s bedroom pop and Sofia Coppola’s The Virgin Suicides come to mind). And it wouldn’t be the first time. Rodrigo is on record as having a reverence for the female rock canon. The chorus of her breakout single “Good 4 U” bore such a strong resemblance to Paramore’s “Misery Business” that members Hayley Williams and Josh Farro were later added as co-writers. In a 2023 interview with Rolling Stone, she said her mother used to wake her up by blasting Babes in Toyland’s Fontanelle.
The babydoll has been a staple in women’s fashion for almost 100 years. Originally long, then slashed short in the 1940s in response to wartime fabric shortages, it was widely worn and considered synonymous with sensual elegance. It evolved over the decades, through to its 21st century iterations as a form of 2000s partywear and the Tumblr it-girl uniform. In that time, it has cycled on and off the runway, often playful but always inextricably bound up with politics somehow. When Miuccia Prada made it the centrepiece of her spring/summer 2016 collection for Miu Miu, she described it as an “armour” against conservatism.
The babydoll dress made a big comeback last year, with Loewe, Chloé and Alberta Ferretti among other designers all releasing their own twists on the silhouette, which is why we’re seeing so much of it now. Indeed, Rodrigo is hardly the only celebrity to embrace the babydoll for 2026; Taylor Swift, Sabrina Carpenter and Gwyneth Paltrow have all been pictured wearing them. Rodrigo, though, has made it her signature look. In an interview with British Vogue in March of this year, her stylists, sisters Chloe and Chenelle Delgadillo, said they’ve been looking to archive Miu Miu and Marc Jacobs, reworking vintage references to create a look that is “effortless, feminine, with a slightly undone feel”. I’d argue that’s exactly what the Spotify performance delivered.
It’s possible that Rodrigo’s take on the babydoll jars because of how clean-cut it is. A critical component of riot grrrl was about shoving an audience’s unwanted desire back in their own faces, uglier and more monstrous than ever. They wore the babydoll wrecked, ruined, and riddled with confrontational elements – sexually explicit or violent language, not to mention the pure rage of their performance style – that sent their point across. Bikini Kill’s Kathleen Hanna used to perform with the word “slut” written in marker across her stomach. In 1993, she wore a red bodycon minidress with the words “kill me” emblazoned on the front, and wore it to an abortion rights benefit show. “The idea is: What constitutes asking for it?” she said of her thinking behind the outfit when it was reworked for a capsule collection in 2013. “If you wear a dress that says ‘kill me’ on it, does that mean you’re asking for it?”
Rodrigo’s take on the look is, by contrast, a little toothless. The edges have been sewn up and the surfaces buffed as clean as the Four Seasons lobby; a little less What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? and a little more “...Baby One More Time”. But a woman in a dress can be just that… a woman in a dress. Hanna’s philosophy was that women invite commentary on their bodies regardless of what they wear. In the age of the Epstein files, and OnlyFans as one of the most popular surrogate solutions to the economic crisis, it seems to me that our valid concern for women and girls is being displaced onto… women and girls. Watching swathes of pop fans (and, let’s be honest, bots) call a twenty-something artist “pedo bait” for having a sense of style, I can’t help but find it all bitterly ironic.