Brett Cooper — Olivia Rodrigo Is Being Canceled Over Her Babydoll Dress

- Well, ladies and gentlemen, in the stand corner of the internet there is drama and we need to talk about it. So thanks to a potentially regretful outfit choice and the woke police that is monitoring everything. Singer, Olivia Rodrigo, who you guys probably know from her song driver's Licence, maybe her feud with Sabrina Carpenter over a boy. She has been thrust into a conversation about paedophilia. This is like not a lighthearted thing, paedophilia and sexualizing children.

And now Taylor Swift has even been brought into it, which like for context, she and Olivia sort of had like a feud. The swifties are activated, Olivia is now responding, blaming other people and it is just a huge mess. But in my opinion, the real story here is that Olivia and her team probably saw an aesthetic. They liked a certain aesthetic, but they are way too out of their depth to understand it or defend it when people online start hitting them with really serious critiques and accusations.

Plus, as an add-on what we're gonna talk about, nothing is original or new anymore. We are just repeating things from decades past, including this exact same controversy right now. Before we dive into this and I tell you how Olivia is just copying Courtney Love like bar for bar. I wanna thank you guys so much for being here. Thank you for liking the videos and commenting and always joining the conversation. If you wanna stay up to date on everything that we're doing here on the channel, make sure to ring that notification bell.

All right, so you see what had happened was, what had happened was that Olivia Rodrigo did a performance last month. She's, you know, launching a new album. So she's, you know, out doing press and performing little snippets of the album. But she did a performance last month wearing what we call a baby doll dress. And this has now spiralled into a whole controversy about who is sexualizing, who if this is pedophilic, if it's problematic, all of the things.

Now for context, this was the dress in question and it is also important to note that under that cute little dress, the little baby doll, she was wearing roughly bloomers, like roughly little mini short bloomer things that people were likening to baby diapers. So baby doll dress, baby doll, baby diapers. But what really set people off is this moment in that specific performance where people said that she was being sexual while wearing that outfit.

Just watch. So as you can see, she's like a scream talk, singing this punk song talking about exploitation. She's tired of hearing about the news where people are talking about her online. She's crawling around raging, doing her whole punk thing that she's really embodied right now. And full disclosure, you know, this all started like two weeks ago and so I saw this clip actually a bunch of people dmd it to me. They were like, Hey, you're gonna talk about it.

I think this is really interesting. But I saw this clip and I personally, you guys might have a different take, but I personally like did not clutch my pearls. I thought it was a bit odd, but I'm not really a huge Olivia Rodrigo fan. I personally think that she's like a little bit overrated. I loved her first album, but is her recent stuff I'm just like, I don't know, I really don't care. I do think I brought up this clip and a little bit of the controversy when I was talking about Sydnee Sweeney and Euphoria a couple of videos ago.

But like I didn't see this and go, oh my gosh, this is insane. It's so gross. I had to do a video about this like right now because it is so crazy. As I started seeing the video more and more and reading the comments and realising that this was kind of turning into a whole controversy, I dunno, I guess I just wasn't flabbergasted or shocked by any of it because basically every single popular female artist right now except my queen, Olivia Dean, who is so classy and beautiful, like every single one of them PR is around the stage talking about sex, singing sex, showing off sex positions, grinding on chairs, on microphone stands, being half naked, having their boobies out.

Like I'm just a bit numb. I'm like, okay, she's crawling around, she's yelling at things, she's wearing a dress with poofy sleeves, like who isn't doing that in 2026? But as I have now realised two weeks later, because people are still talking about this, I guess the internet was not as numb as I was. And so they saw that video and they unleashed. For example, one person commented and said, you are normalising paedophilia.

That style of clothing is not intended for adult women. You are sexualizing children's wear. Same with those school girl outfits. This is a known fetish. You can blame gross men all you want, but continuing to appeal to it is not going to make it stop. Another person said, maybe I am too woke, which I always do appreciate the self-awareness. Another comment read for real though. That baby doll shit on a grown woman is straight.

Nick looks like she's cosplaying as a kid. It's weird af another person said Maybe I'm too woke too. Or maybe we're all just too sane to pretend that a 22-year-old crawling in toddlers bloomers is art and not straight up unsettling. I think that that comment is probably more along the lines of where I land. I'm just like, okay. It's like not really my speed, but again the world is so weird that I think there are worse things now from here, it all just took on a world of its own like posts were getting tens of millions of impressions like dissecting the dress, dissecting what she was wearing, what she was contributing to, what she was sexualizing, ripping into her for all of it.

Before we dive into more of my thoughts on this and what her team did, that honestly just made the entire situation so much worse and made them look so dense. I do think it's important to be fair to Olivia here because these baby doll dresses the roughly bloomer mini shorts. They might be weird to some and I get that because it's kind of an odd trend, but they are a style right now. Like they are literally everywhere.

I wore a baby doll dress to my baby shower with shorts under it. It was very comfortable. It was in like the sweltering sun of August. It was like the best thing I could wear, but like it is a, a normal thing that young women are wearing. It is a style that Olivia has now adopted as she's promoting her new album as you can see in the pictures here. So she's literally wearing a little girly baby doll dress with a big collar in the cover for this new album.

And even in the music video for the album's lead single, which we will put up right here, she was dancing around Versailles in France in another little baby doll dress and you guessed it bloomers. And yes, before you ask guys bloomers, they are a trend. They are sold everywhere. They're all over that women's clothing site revolve. They're all over my TikTok like this is what women are wearing out. Complain all you want.

I think it's very odd you will not catch me dead in a literal pair of bloomers, but some women like it. So the point is you can take issue with the style all you want, but it's nothing that Olivia has come up with on her own. It is a very popular trend that honestly kind of might be on the way out and she has adopted it for this album. And it is also important to note that it has been a trend before. Like the baby doll dresses the bloomer.

Look, they were actually never about baby dolls or dresses. It was about rationing fabric in the 1940s during World War ii. It was started by a lingerie designer in the forties. You can see the original photos here. Women could not wear the long nightgowns anymore 'cause there was no fabric. So they made it into a cute little like short and top situation. And then years later just adding onto that big fashion houses like Xi and Balenciaga, they use the which I put on screen right here.

This was the style for women in and outside of the bedroom. Now I do wanna say that none of that looks as cosy as my cosy earth pyjamas right now. Finally, literally last night Alex and I were talking about pyjamas and he said, well I know you love your little outfit. And I was like, my little outfit like what? And then I realised he was talking about my cosy earth set of pyjamas. That is what he meant, my little bamboo outfit that I wear every single night to bed because it is so comfortable.

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This is really where it gets interesting to me and where it got really relevant for Olivia because these dresses, they actually go back way further than just being part of a, you know, secular fashion trend because they're especially relevant in regards to punk singers like what Olivia is doing right now on stage with this album, blending this like cutesy, girly, almost childlike look with the angry grunge talk singing in the Big doc Martins that she's stomping around on stage in, she's literally just copying singers like Courtney Love because per usual, nobody is original.

So the story with that is that back in the 1990s, baby doll dresses became this chosen uniform of a youth rebellion. It was like rebelling against the oppressive fashion, the patriarchy, like all the normal stuff that kids these days still are screaming about. But that's the history. One article from Harper's Bazaar says that the baby doll dress returned with a vengeance in the 1990s as female rockers paired vintage dresses from goodwill with loads of red lipstick, bleached blonde hair, torn stockings, plastic barrettes.

And Mary Janes known as kinder whore. Don't worry, don't freak out yet, we're gonna get into that. But term attributed to British music journalist Everett, true the look functioned as a subversive gesture. It sought to pervert and reclaim the fetishization of youth by the patriarchy, by turning the archetype of the innocent and fragile young girl into a wicked and powerful creature who wield an electric guitar and screamed.

So the women and the young people who originated this whole they were not trying to sexualize children, they were trying to subvert the image of a docile sweet girl. This like vision of a woman from the patriarchy into their screaming punk fantasy, which you can see in these images right here, Courtney Love is on the right. And Courtney once said that it was more about irony than anything else. She wanted to have this like caricature of a sweet docile, good girl aesthetic and then like destroy it on stage.

Now obviously people are hung up on the phrase kinder whore that is like objectively a very gross term. But that was a descriptor that was placed on women like Courtney Love by journalists and critics like Courtney Love actually largely rejected the phrase she did not like it. She spent years saying that's not what I was trying to do here. That was not the point, that was not the intention. Which now brings me back to Olivia Rodrigo because the same thing is happening here 30 years later, a performer adopts a certain aesthetic, gets on stage, and then that aesthetic is critiqued and sexualized by viewers is distorted in the performer's mind.

And so I think that there are two separate conversations here that interest me. Number one, yes, we all can debate on whether this is an appropriate thing for her or anybody to be wearing and if she is going to be wearing it, what she should and should not do on stage if it is harmful. I personally, again, like reiterating what I said earlier, I think that there are worse things. Again, it's not my favourite, but maybe I'm just numb to the horrors that persist on the internet.

Like I don't know if this woke generation, all of the people that are policing Olivia Rodrigo, like I don't know if they would've survived Miley Cyrus literally grinding on and sexualizing a baby bottle and like sort of twerking and sexualizing herself in a cryp like she was actually sexualizing a baby. And then of course there's Sabrina Carpenter who is huge right now, way more popular than Olivia Rodrigo, honestly.

She wore similar outfits, literally you can see her here. She is wearing a baby doll nightgown, she has little shorts under there, but she crawled her out on the stage, sang about sex the entire time, literally showed off a different sex position on stage every single night for each stop of her. Why are we more outraged about Olivia Rodrigo versus this? And by the way, Sabrina Carpenter has also adopted the nightgown and grunge look, you can see you're here wearing the exact same outfit that Olivia was wearing on stage.

Euphoria is showing OnlyFans girls doing baby play fetish. People are wanting sympathy for maps. Minor attracted people. Journalists are promoting sex robots to help these minor attracted people. Like I'm sorry, but they're in my opinion, my personal opinion, I feel like there are worse things than a punk try hard performer that is jumping on a fashion trend years after everybody else has and 30 years after the mothers of punk did the exact same thing.

However, what I do think is weird and a little unfortunate is that it seems like Olivia Rodrigo can't actually defend or explain her choice. And this goes back to nothing being intentional or original. So just take a look at how she responded to the controversy. This was in a New York Times interview podcast that they did, this is how she - Responded. One of the - Other things, you've been a lightning rod over Liz, like the baby doll dress - That's been making me so upset.

Not even for me, like I don't care. People could sew whatever they want. Yeah. What does that mean to you? What does that that what, what it really mean to you? What's really like disturbing is like I feel like I actually wear, I have worn outfits that are like maybe revealing on stage, like I've been on stage and like a sparkly bra and like little shorts and like which is my right. That's, I felt cool and comfortable in that and like that wasn't inappropriate but me like fully covered up in a dress that people deemed to be like childlike was inappropriate.

And I just think it, it just like shows how we just like really normalise paedophilia in in our culture. And also it's just is this this like rhetoric that we're fed as girls since we're so little, which is like, don't wear that because then a man is gonna sexualize your body and it's your fault. Like it's so weird and I, I didn't think that I looked sexy in that at all. I was like, this is so cool. I feel like I've like Kathleen Hannah or like Courtney love all these people who are my heroes and I felt cool and comfortable in it.

- So yes, she did reference Courtney love at the very end there, but she kind of broadly just threw it back on everybody else and said, this is because women are controlled and we're told what to wear and what not to wear. She kind of threw out the blanket statement of paedophilia and now people online are even angrier. Like that did not help in the slightest. Somebody commented and said nobody was normalising paedophilia.

That misses the point entirely. The criticism was about mixing childlike aesthetics with adult performance imagery, not about blaming women for being sexualized. She's twisting the issue to fit her narrative. Another person said, girl, shut the F up. The reason why your fans didn't flip out on you wearing shorts or bras is because you at least dress like a grown adult. You can sexualize yourself all you want. But if you're gonna do that while being on stage in an effing toddler dress, crawling around cosplaying as a child and then touching yourself like that, then yeah people are gonna be weirded out by that.

You cannot possibly be that dense. Now, in my opinion, on how this all came about, I am sure that you know, Olivia is on TikTok like I am seeing what everybody is wearing. I'm sure that she thought this was a cool aesthetic ties into the punk rockers that she is trying to emulate. She came up with a Pinterest board, she said it to her stylist and she is simply just trying to mirror it. Therefore she can't really defend it and instead of trying to defend it or educating people on what is actually I think a really interesting history of the style, a cool story.

It seems like her team pushed for a PR blitz from Vogue to provide some legitimacy for the fashion choice. But they made the grave error of pulling Taylor Swift into the story basically saying, look, look, Taylor Swift also wears these dresses so it's totally fine. I mean they literally made her the entire headline. It reads with Taylor Swift's endorsement, we have officially entered peak baby doll season and they used this specific paparazzi photo in this dress as proof.

And the first line of the entire article reads alert emoji breaking news for all of you. Swifties Taylor Swift is pro baby doll dress. So essentially saying get on board, support Olivia. And then from there the entire article just becomes about Olivia and the controversy and choosing to defend her. And let's just say that the swifties, they mobilised as they do, they were very unhappy, which honestly I get because Taylor had nothing to do with any of this and she was not even wearing a baby doll dress.

What you see in that photo is not a baby doll dress, it is a mini dress. Somebody commented and said exactly that it's a mini dress and Taylor wears it in a classy way. She writes not like Olivia who was wearing a diaper and then lifting the dress up to show it. It is actually disgusting how much negative PR her team does against Taylor. Like how threatened are you? Now the online reaction to this very obviously placed PR article was so bad.

The Swifties mobilised so quickly. The Vogue author literally privated her Instagram account. They were, you know, calling for her to be fired. Vogue, we will never take you seriously ever again. This is bought and paid for. It was an entire thing. So another lesson here is don't test the swifties. I learned that a long time ago, but just in case anybody has missed it, don't test them. Now, from my view, looking at the story, all of this feels like a very terrible combination of some bad PR and copying some potentially problematic aesthetics without actually being able to stand behind the very interesting and relevant history.

Now, I also think that there is maybe some hypocritical woke outrage because like they're getting upset about a baby doll dress and yet they're watching euphoria and have no problem with the weird fetish crap that they are pushing there. Like again, we talked about that in the Sydney Sweeney episode, but it's like, let's just like be consistent. There are things that are so disgusting that cross so many lines that happen every single day.

People just turn a blind eye to, I mean, talk about the crap that happens in schools on a daily basis. Young kids talking about sexuality and whether they wanna change their gender, talk about the dildos that are being shown in health classes. And the same community. I guarantee the same community that is yelling at Olivia Rodrigo is going, oh no, that's really important. That's actually, that's health, that's, that's progress.

To show those children sexy books and dildos, it's like, oh my God. There are more important things to consider. And so in my opinion, Olivia crawling around on the floor while like talk singing, yes, it is a bit odd. It is not my cup of tea. But unfortunately, unfortunately for me and for you, I have seen far more perverse things online that are harmful for children. I see women wearing bloomers out every single day.

I own a baby doll dress. So this personally is not something that is going to ruffle my feathers. I will not be joining in on the Olivia Rodrigo hate this time.