In her music video for Drop Dead, Olivia Rodrigo twirls through the muraled halls of Versailles in a lilac chemise and frilled bloomers. Seeing her dance through the gilded state rooms in her vintage-undergarment-inspired look (courtesy of Chloé pre-fall 2026), one can easily imagine Marie Antoinette doing the very same a few centuries earlier.
In the video and styling, the 23-year-old channels a a free-spiritedness evocative of ’60s icons like Twiggy and Jane Birkin. But it’s actually the punk lineage of the style that Rodrigo appears most drawn to.
“I really love the idea of a babydoll [dress],” Rodrigo recently told Vogue. “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.”
In a nod to that grunge lineage, Rodrigo took to the stage in Barcelona this week wearing a babydoll dress: a floral Génération78 number complete with ribbon detailing, lace frills, and matching bloomer shorts — paired with knee-high Doc Martens. But the outfit sparked outrage online. In a cultural climate still reckoning with high-profile revelations of large-scale sexual abuse, Olivia’s choice to wear a babydoll snowballed into something much larger than just a dress.
Beneath the outrage [against Olivia Rodrigo] sits a very real cultural anxiety. It has simply been aimed at the wrong target.
Elizabeth whitehead
On X, formerly Twitter, a viral clip of Olivia Rodrigo performing onstage in her Génération78 babydoll set was posted alongside the caption “Maybe I’m just too woke.” The clip, which has since been viewed more than 26 million times, sparked accusations that the singer was “infantilizing and sexualizing” herself due to the perceived childlike associations of the babydoll silhouette and bloomer shorts. The most-liked reply reads: “Why TF is she dressing like a toddler? … Who the hell stans this kind of abhorrent behavior?”
The discourse continued, alleging that Rodrigo was “dressing like a baby,” invoking Lolita-esque imagery and capitalizing on the sexualization of youth. Fashion enthusiasts quickly pushed back, pointing to the babydoll’s long lineage in fashion — from the mod girls of the ’60s to the riot grrrls of the ’90s. But the backlash persisted.
This is not the first time the babydoll dress has been the subject of controversy. Emerging in the 1940s as a shortened form of adult sleepwear during wartime fabric shortages, the silhouette was popularized by the 1956 film Baby Doll written by Tennessee Williams. In the film, actress Caroll Baker portrays a sexualized young woman who wears a babydoll nightgown, sleeps in a crib and sucks her thumb, helping calcify the garment’s mixed associations as both innocent and sexy.
In the ’60s, the silhouette returned when mod women embraced loose clothing and shorter hemlines that became synonymous with the burgeoning sexual revolution. And decades later, riot grrrl and grunge musicians brought back the babydoll once more — subverting the garment’s associations with ‘innocent’ femininity by juxtaposing it with the darker themes of their music and pairing it with ripped stockings, smeared lipstick, and smudged eye makeup. The babydoll has always been a charged object in fashion. That part hasn’t changed. What has changed is the sheer intensity of the response to a woman simply wearing one. Because in our current cultural moment, it is no longer just about the dress.
The babydoll dress has become a folk devil, precisely because the real devil persists elsewhere.
Elizabeth Whitehead
The criticisms levelled against Rodrigo were, for the most part, driven by over exaggeration and projection. And on the surface, the fixation on whether a certain cut of dress counts as some agent of moral destruction sounds completely irrational. Paranoid, even. But beneath the outrage sits a very real cultural anxiety, rooted in real events. It has simply been aimed at the wrong target.
In the wake of revelations about institutional corruption and abuse, we are living through the absurdity of a business-as-usual approach to life amid deeply destabilising truths about power. The release of the Epstein files exposed not only the systematic abuse of young girls, but the proximity of that abuse to wealth and political power. It is a rupture our culture is still reckoning with — one for which there remains little to no accountability.
When there is no meaningful way to address the fact that one of the most powerful leaders in the world is allegedly mentioned in the Epstein files more times than God is in the Bible, it seems almost inevitable that outrage will begin to leak out sideways instead. After all, it is far easier to litigate the morality of a young woman’s outfit than it is to demand accountability from institutional power that originated these fears.
Moral panics gain traction because they offer people a sense of control over fears that feel far out of our control, or even our understanding. But moral panics rarely direct their energy toward the true source of social fear. The Satanic Panic of the 1980s projected similar anxieties onto heavy metal music, goth aesthetics, and even games like Dungeons & Dragons.
In sociology, this is what is known as a folk devil. A folk devil is when social anxieties get collapsed into a symbolic object: often a subculture, style of dress, or form of music. A folk devil gives a face to something that is otherwise faceless; creating a simplified narrative that is easier to metabolise than the true source of the fear.
Fashion and pop culture have always made effective targets for folk devils because they are visual and present in the public imagination. Institutions, by contrast, are faceless abstractions — difficult to locate, difficult to confront, and even more difficult to hold accountable.
And in our current cultural moment, it makes sense that the babydoll dress has become something larger than itself — a tenterhook that has caught very real anxieties of a cultural landscape still reckoning with high-profile revelations of trafficking, abuse of minors and institutional failure. But the babydoll dress has become a folk devil, precisely because the real devil persists elsewhere.
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