Internet outrage is what greeted Olivia Rodrigo and her Chloé Pre-Fall 2026 babydoll dress in her drop dead music video; a decadent fever dream filmed inside the Château de Versailles.
Rodrigo drifts through the palace in a gauzy cream babydoll dress and bloomers, racing down gilt corridors, collapsing across banquet tables and smearing her mascara. The styling – platform shoes, tangled hair, abbreviated hemlines and deliberately dishevelled makeup – drew immediate criticism online. It was a familiar moral panic. Commentators accused the singer of “infantilising” herself, dressing “like a toddler,” or aestheticising girlhood in a way they deemed regressive.
But the singer doubled down with another ultra-short babydoll silhouette from Génération78 in Barcelona for the Spotify Billions Club Live performance, once again sparking debate.
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But the backlash overlooked the garment’s long and politically charged history. Since emerging in the early 20th century, the babydoll has consistently unsettled cultural expectations around femininity, sexuality and youth. The style first entered the fashion vocabulary through Paul Poiret’s rejection of Edwardian corsetry, replacing rigid tailoring with high waists and fluid movement. During the Second World War, American lingerie designer Sylvia Pedlar shortened nightdresses in response to wartime fabric rationing. Her airy, above-the-knee designs became commercially successful, even though Pedlar herself reportedly despised the term “babydoll.” Then, in 1956, Tennessee Williams’ film Baby Doll cemented the garment’s erotic reputation, with Carroll Baker appearing in short, lace-trimmed dresses that scandalised conservative audiences and drew condemnation from the Catholic Legion of Decency.
By 1958, Cristóbal Balenciaga had elevated the silhouette into couture, transforming it through his trapeze dresses, which abandoned the cinched waist entirely in favour of sculptural volume and a new approach to postwar fashion. Hubert de Givenchy soon followed with sack dresses. And in the 1960s, Mary Quant embraced the babydoll as part of youthquake London, turning it into a symbol of generational rebellion. Twiggy, Jane Birkin and Brigitte Bardot wore abbreviated versions styled with Mary Janes, kohl-rimmed eyes and an intentionally adolescent aesthetic that deeply irritated traditionalists.
What Rodrigo’s Versailles performance ultimately reveals is how cyclical this outrage really is. Every generation seems to rediscover the babydoll and declare it provocative, childish or somehow dangerous. Today’s designers are once again reworking the babydoll through sheer fabrics, puffed sleeves, bloomers and doll-like proportions. Whether worn sweetly or subversively, the babydoll remains one of fashion’s most misunderstood silhouettes – and one of its most enduring. Ahead, the pieces defining the modern babydoll revival now.
Babydoll dresses to shop
Dôen Nessie Dress
POSSE Ezra Tunic
Bernadette Checked Seersucker Mini Dress
Miguelina Havana Dress
Chloé Floral Pleated Minidress
Louis Vuitton Broderie Trim Babydoll Dress
Sandy Liang Black Miyo Minidress
Loretta Caponi Fiocchini Dress
Les Vacances Les Vacances d’Irina Dress
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