First came the return of Y2K fashion and Bratz glam with rhinestone everything and chunky heels. Then there was the short-lived Barbiecore era, heralded by Valentino Pink PP, the miniskirt revival and the chaotic announcements around the upcoming Greta Gerwig Barbie movie. Now, if the SS23 runways shows are anything to go by, the fashion industry is still intent on digging through toy boxes. Babydoll dresses – those billowy, loose-fitting gowns that creepy Victorian china dolls wear – have been cropping up in new collections by the likes of Rick Owens, Versace, Comme Des Garçons, Loewe and Ludovic de Saint Sernin. The tone they struck, however, was unlike what you’d typically expect – less ugly horror menace à la Annabelle, more the chic clothes you’d see on the porcelain body of chaotic evil it-girl du jour, M3GAN.
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This isn’t the first time the babydoll dress has had a renaissance. The name babydoll became associated with the empire cut (a high-waisted bodice fitted to a gathered, loose skirt) in the 1940s, when designer Sylvia Pedlar began making comfortable lingerie with short hemlines (a response to wartime fabric shortages) that resembled the loose garms of children’s dolls. She reportedly hated the term babydoll, though, and never used it herself. The name was later cemented by the messed up Tennessee Williams-scripted movie Baby Doll (1956), whose titular character is a 19-year-old in a cutesy floral smock; infantilised by her father and husband, and forced to sleep in a crib until her 20th birthday when it’s agreed the marriage can finally be consummated.
In the late 50s, Cristóbal Balenciaga couture-ified the look with lace fabrics cascading from trapeze-necklines; while Hubert de Givenchy took the silhouette and removed the girlish detailing to create the sack dress. “I’ve dreamt of a liberated woman who will no longer be swathed in fabric, armour-plated,” he said at the time. “Garments that will float on a body delivered from bondage.” As we reached the 60s, mod icons like Twiggy androgenised the babydoll and, decades later, Courtney Love shook the whole thing up with the 90s kinderwhore aesthetic, whereby rock star antics held a middle finger up to the sweet and innocent connotations of the dress.
This kinderwhore mood is what has stuck. For SS12, Meadham Kirchoff had a gaggle of girls rocking Courtney-esque shags and silk babydoll dresses with mary janes and pastel tights in the collection, A Wolf In Sheep’s Clothing. Miu Miu’s SS16 collection explored the darkness hidden behind the sweet; Mrs Prada showcased sheer pastel babydoll looks over grungier and more mature outfits. It spoke to the political move to conservatism she was noticing on the right and the left. More recently, a heavily pregnant Rihanna, unapologetically serving sexually-empowered maternity wear, wore a gothic sheer tulle babydoll by Dior with a lacy thong underneath, PVC boots and a leather trench coat to the house’s AW22 show.
It’s hardly surprising, then, to see the babydoll dress popping up across the SS23 runways as designers respond to the politics around us, as governments from the US to Iran try to define and contain what femininity, womanhood and motherhood is and can do (and thus what the antithesis to that is), and women the world over speak out and stand up for their rights.
“I have always loved a rebel,” Donatella shared in her show notes for Versace SS23, a collection that championed subversive femininity. “A woman who is confident, smart and a little bit of a diva. She wears leather, studs and frayed denim and she has enough attitude to mix them with chiffon, jersey, and a tiara!” Here, the lace bodice babydoll dresses — creased like the models had picked them up from the corner of the room and thrown them on — were paired with black nail varnish, neon indie sleaze veils and lace gloves and tattoo-revealing sheer stockings.
In response to his own dystopian scenes for AW22, Rick Owens’ SS23 show still held the designer’s usual apocalyptic aesthetic, but bled with a sense of hope and rebirth, presented through the feminine. “Jellyfish silhouettes’,’ reminiscent of babydoll dresses with their delicate, sheer recycled-tulle empire mini-skirts, came in joyous pinks and yellows and in rebellious waist-scraping hemlines. They spoke to Rick’s wider message with the collection of “a vote for otherness — a departure from tasteful and perhaps narrow aesthetic conventions and maybe an encouragement to consider open-mindedness in other areas outside of personal appearance.”
More babydoll looks were seen at Loewe SS23, an exploration of the silhouette-transforming power of fashion, as striped polo tops trumpeted into tiny trapeze skirts that created an optical illusion design fitting for Jonathan Anderson’s recent explorations of the boundaries of reality and artifice, and what that means for the individual.
At emerging Parisian designer-slash-publication All-In, strips of tinsel were formed into a Christmas ornament-like babydoll dress in a collection called Debutante that spoke to the adult dreams and fantasies of a teenage girl at her high school Christmas party.
In the conservative push across the world, it’s not just womanhood that has been targeted, but also gender expression, identity and queerness. At Ludovic de Saint Sernin SS23, models of all genders walked out in beige babydoll dresses with tiny punctured bodices that extended into thigh-scraping pleated skirts, rebelling against the strictures of gender norms by all embracing a sluttified version of the Victorian doll aesthetic.
In its modern usage the babydoll has become a form of drag. The 1940s style lingerie dress becoming a contemporary way of embodying the strictures of traditional femininity still being enforced on the individual, in order to then critique them. It’s telling that the most recent babydoll look to go viral was adorning M3GAN, a sentient robot doll turned feral from the upcoming movie M3GAN (John Carpenter did once say “horror is a reaction, it’s not a genre”, after all). As Meadham Kirchoff would put it, M3GAN is a wolf in sheep’s clothing; a robot programmed to be a sweet and innocent role model childminder to young girls who instead is murdering bullies and dancing with a machette to Taylor Swift. That’s a big kinderwhore slay. Courtney Love would be proud.
