The recovery of the babydoll dress

The babydoll dress swept the Spring 2023 runways like no other silhouette. From Loewe's vibrant striped wonders to Versace's Courtney Love little nothings, loose, pint-sized dresses with major volume have quickly become the item on everyone's mind. And then there was M3GAN, the realistic AI doll horror heroine of 2023 who proudly sports a pale pink silk satin mini dress layered over a striped long-sleeved t-shirt.

Her triumphant return has everything to do with epic amounts of femininity when it comes to aesthetics. But it's also one of the most interesting clothing silhouettes when it comes to feminism and how it was shaped during the war, and then reinvented by the punk scene. Perhaps no other dress has had as much to say throughout history as the babydoll.

According to Sarah Collins, professor and fashion historian at Savannah College of Art and Design, the exact origin of the babydoll dress is unknown, but The term itself first appears in the 1912 novel Captain Martha Mary by Avery Abbott. In fact, the silhouette we recognize today is closely associated with 1930s lingerie. more risky in the bedroom," says Collins. “They became very popular in the 1940s after American designer Sylvia Pedlar of Iris Lingerie shortened lingerie in response to wartime L-85 fabric rationing. It is said that she personally hated the term babydoll. The legend takes its name from the 1956 dark comedy Baby Doll, based on a play by Tennessee Williams. In the film, Carroll Baker plays a 19-year-old virgin, "Baby Doll" Meighan, who is married to an older man. They are waiting for his 20th birthday to consummate the marriage. She wears babydoll-style lingerie and sleeps in a crib."

Carroll Baker in Baby Doll.

At the time, the babydoll was firmly filtered with an obvious masculine look, but high fashion also embraced the style a few years later. “[Cristóbal] Balenciaga popularized the silhouette for day and evening in 1958 with his trapeze dress. After so many years of the New Look silhouette, the babydoll felt fresh and youthful. At the same time, Hubert de Givenchy also amplifies the trend with his bag dresses. These styles led to the super short A-line dresses of the 1960s, where Twiggy embodied the blending of a little girl's innocence with a newfound sexual freedom for women."

The 60s were also perhaps the most pivotal time for the silhouette simply by nature. "Once the babydoll moves into the 1960s and gets shorter and shorter, it gets even riskier," says Collins. The look is one that represents an uprising of feminism and also ties into subcultures that cross generations into the 90s. Collins adds, “Socially, at that time, young people and women in particular knew about sexual freedom and were busy getting rid of stifling rules of behavior. With the Riot Grrrl look of the 1990s, the babydoll is once again becoming...