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 5 ft., 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 A.N. 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.
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