The baby doll is mine and I manage it.

Every time an article dedicated to clothing and its ideological ramifications begins, regarding what a particular garment implies when worn in a specific context, those who see fashion as a concentration of frivolities devoid of any cultural validity are often tempted to dismiss the topic with the ultimate tautology of “they’re just clothes.” To refute this statement, if it were needed, it sufficed the uproar caused in recent weeks by the baby-doll worn by Olivia Rodrigo in Barcelona, where she performed at Spotify’s Billions Club Live.

The 23-year-old Californian took the stage probably unaware that shortly after, the Internet would engage in a verbal brawl, using terms like “sexy baby” or even “pedo-core.” On one hand, critics blamed her for “infantilizing” herself, referring to deviant and dangerous lolita aesthetics, while the singer’s substantial fandom (or even those who simply thought differently) argued that a pop star has the freedom to dress as she pleases. Even Courtney Love entered the fray, who has made baby-dolls a religion in her career, writing that “If you are sexualizing this (the specific garment, ed. note), maybe the problem is you… you’ll have to pry the baby-doll from my cold dead hands.”

Rodrigo’s fault was insisting on her clothing error: if in Barcelona she wore a baby-doll from the brand Génération 78, paired with Dr. Martens boots, the piece (however signed by Chloé, part of the pre-fall 2026 collection) she had already flaunted in the video for her single Drop Dead, shot by Petra Collins, which portrayed her dancing through the halls of Versailles, with headphones in her ears and, indeed, a baby-doll paired with knee-high knitted socks. An imagery that clearly referenced, even in the choice of location, the aesthetics of Sofia Coppola and her Marie Antoinette, but also the nightgowns of the Lisbon sisters from The Virgin Suicides, forever trapped in the collective mythology in their bedrooms, in that liminal and mysterious phase that separates adolescence from adulthood.

The discord that arises already from the first name

Historically, the very idea of the baby-doll and its nomenclature indeed underscore a certain belonging to a middle ground: when it was conceived in 1942 by lingerie designer Sylvia Pedlar, the idea was simply to overcome the limitations imposed on fabrics during the years of World War II, with creativity capable of lightening a historically dramatic moment. It began to be called baby-doll probably for the reduced volumes that resembled a doll’s dress, but that term Pedlar openly detested, and she refused to use it for her entire life.

To add fuel to the fire came the homonymous film by Elia Kazan in 1956 (renamed in Italian as La bambola viva), an adaptation of two works by Tennessee Williams (27 Wagons Full of Cotton andThe Unsatisfactory Supper)that centered the screenplay around actress Carrol Baker in the role of “Baby Doll” Meighan, a 19-year-old unnamed bride of Archie Lee Meighan, a middle-aged man who had promised her deceased father to take care of his daughter, without being able to consummate the marriage until her twentieth birthday. To avoid temptations, Baby Doll therefore slept in a separate room, in an iron crib (the same one that later appears on the film’s promotional poster, with Baker inside dressed, of course, in baby-doll). The work predictably sparked an outcry from the American and even Italian Catholic world but definitively popularized the use of the garment among women who had surpassed the adolescence of “Baby Doll Meighan.” In 1958, even one of the most refined couture thinkers, Cristóbal Balenciaga, was inspired by the garment, creating lace dresses with boat necks and A-line cuts, calling them “baby-doll dresses.” An imagery from the 1950s diva that pop stars like Sabrina Carpenter (who wears it on stage) as well as Addison Rae refer to.

The inversion of the patriarchal device with the kinderwhore

Yet, in the 1990s, that same imagery (used by today’s pop stars to evoke the times of innocence of a country that can no longer be defined as innocent) was subverted in its meaning by women who were tired of being defined by devices invented for them by others, specifically to categorize them and render them harmless. The incendiary power of personalities like Courtney Love and Kat Bjelland (together in the Babes in Toyland project, prior to Hole) was not only in the freedoms they claimed for women in a predominantly male and sexist environment, that of 1990s rock, but also in the clothes they wore to do so, among which stood out the baby-dolls of Love and Bjelland, as well as the sugary-hued dresses with round Peter Pan collars worn by Kathleen Hanna of Bikini Kill.

Dresses that we would probably define as “childish” today and that found their ironic counterpoint in makeup made of running mascara and lips with wrong profiles, highlighting the ridiculous if not even grotesque nature of certain aesthetic stereotypes. The aesthetic posture ended up being named Kinderwhore, and to this day there are still debates about the official parent of this term: The Guardian claims that the lexical imprimatur comes from Bjelland herself, while i-D attributes the credit to Melody Maker journalist True Everett. In a lengthy 1994 interview given to Rolling Stone, when asked about it, Love herself said, “I like to think that I’m changing some psychological and sexual aspects of rock music. Not because it’s desirable: I didn’t do the kinderwhore thing because I thought I was sexy. When I started, it was more of a What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? thing. The angle I chose was irony.”

In an essay written for SHOWStudio, fashion scholar Morna Laing, author of the book Picturing the Woman-Child: Fashion, Feminism and the Female Gaze, argued that “the kinderwhore can be understood as a kind of drag: it exaggerates and grotesquely displays the contradictory expectations of ideal femininity; it betrays its construction; it subverts it from within.” Specifically, she referred to the English brand Meadham Kirchhoff’s runway show, which for spring/summer 2012 (titled A Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing) opened with an army of Love replicas, with her platinum blonde hair and hyper-feminine clothing, busy reapplying lipstick among balloon arches, to the notes of Miss World, a song by Hole from 1994 in which Love powdered her pale face, wearing a virginal white dress and a vacant stare. And it was Love, not by chance, who reposted that same runway show on her IG profile a week ago, coinciding with the uproar sparked online by Rodrigo, reiterating that time passes, but the mistakes we make, the clothes we are scandalized by – not because of the clothes, but because of the meanings we believe they carry – are always the same. All this despite the various waves of feminism that have succeeded one another, and that have never truly washed us of that viscous obsession we have with the female body and our desire to control its manifestations to authorize and validate its existence in society.An approach that becomes even more dramatic, if one considers that Olivia Rodrigo’s posture in the music system is in no way divisive, and that baby-doll had nothing to do in intent with that of Courtney Love, whom Rodrigo cited as an inspiration in a podcast a few days ago with the New York Times, where she spoke about the dispute stating that “I absolutely did not think I was sexy, my intent was not to sexualize, I was thinking about how Kathleen Hanna and Courtney Love wore it. What I find disturbing is that I have certainly worn more revealing clothes on stage, sparkling bras, micro shorts, which is my right, I was having fun and felt cool: that has never been considered inappropriate. Me wearing a dress that people considered ‘childish’ sparked a drama: for me this only shows how much we normalize pedophilia today, and this rhetoric with which we are fed as girls, that is, the one that invites us not to wear certain clothes, because otherwise men will sexualize our bodies.”

In the end, hers was an aesthetic homage – to which she was totally entitled – a pastiche smoothed out from all the rough edges and contradictions hinted at by Love and Hanna. A textile device disarmed, yet still not harmless enough for the web censors, who care so much about women’s freedom of expression and their bodies, that they take it upon themselves to protect it, whether they like it or not (which was the same thing that President Trump said in the last election campaign, and we know how that turned out). Because in the end, they have never been “just clothes.”