Sabrina Carpenter is sometimes likened to a Bratz doll, often a Polly Pocket. This is because she is a) blonde, b) measures no more than 5ft, and c) wears babydoll dresses with plastic platform heels. (She is, in her own words, “Short n’ Sweet”.
) But when I first came across this image of the pop star wearing a shin-length plaid skirt earlier this week, I was reminded of a different kind of tortured lyricist, and of something the feminist writer AN Devers once said of Sylvia Plath ’s signature kilt. “She wasn’t cutting edge in her fashion, she left that to her work,” Devers explained of the late poet’s uniform in 2021. “The skirt represents Plath and her personality in every way – the conflict inside, her inner art monster, cloaked by the most precise, nearly persnickety, clothes.
She wore things that don’t go out of style and selected them with meticulous attention to quality and durability.” Carpenter is perhaps the last person culture would compare to Plath – although she’d for sure title a song “ Daddy ” – and perhaps also the last person I would expect to be photographed in a brown-and-bookish skirt. This is, after all, the same person who croons from a toilet seat on a Barbie Dreamhouse-style stage; the same person who makes “69” jokes and has a song called “Nonsense”, despite also being famous for speaking the phrase, “That’s that me, espresso” into existence.
And yet...
the rhyme schemes, the reduplication, the semantic .
