🚨Breaking news for all you Swifties🚨: Taylor Swift is pro-babydoll dress.
Last night, the singer joined her parents and brother for dinner in New York, where she opted for a breezy black crepe Michele-designed Valentino babydoll dress with a silver-sequined bust. Always keen on a little sparkle, Swift added a pair of rhinestone-encrusted peep-toe Louboutins, the red bottoms matching her signature red lip.
Swift is hardly the only pop star to embrace the babydoll dress this week. On Friday, Olivia Rodrigo teased her forthcoming album in Barcelona, dressed in a pink ditsy floral peasant-sleeved minidress and matching bloomers. While Swift went the more glamorous route, Rodrigo went for a punkier look, styling her babydoll dress with knee-high Doc Martens.
Rodrigo caught some flak for her outfit, with some fans calling the look infantilizing. But, as the singer reminded Vogue, the babydoll dress plays a significant—and subversive—role in music history. For riot grrrls like Courtney Love, Kat Bjelland, and Kim Gordon, the ultra-femme, thigh-skimming dress sat in stark contrast to their grungy musical stylings. For Rodrigo, they are direct influences in her new look: “I just remember being younger and having pictures of Courtney Love and Kat Bjelland from all these riot grrrl punk bands in their babydoll dresses, just owning it,” she said.
Swift and Rodrigo aren’t the only present-day pop stars to take the babydoll dress for a spin of late. The gauzy babydolls that Sabrina Carpenter wore on her SNL performance and all throughout her Short n’ Sweet tour were homages to Brigitte Bardot. For the singer, the look was all about comfort. “I have no insecurities—no thoughts about anything—because I’m just so comfortable in those little dresses,” she told Vogue. Really, what more could a performer want?
Each of these singers has staked their own claim on the look, from Olivia Rodrigo’s riot grrrl influences to Sabrina Carpenter’s 1960s throwbacks, and now Taylor Swift’s glitzier take. Regardless of the inspiration, one thing is clear: The babydoll dress is alive and well amongst the pop star set.
