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Welcome to Addressed, a weekly column where we, ahem, address the joys (and tribulations!) of getting dressed. So far, we’ve unpacked how to wear shorts at the office and beyond, how to pack a carry-on bag for a work trip, how to dress with style in your third trimester, and even how to layer without looking like that chair in your room (you know the one). Download the Vogue app, and find our Style Advice section to submit your question.
As simple as it is, the baby tee is a complicated garment. The snug-fitting t-shirt became popular in the 1990s, when many young women experimented with signifiers of traditional girlhood and femininity because they wanted to turn them on their head or simply because they felt sexy in them, which suited them just fine. Linda Meltzer, the woman credited with “inventing” the baby tee, was a music video and film stylist who obsessively combed thrift stores for 1970s French children’s tees until she just decided to make her own. Her tees were indeed worn by iconic ’90s characters from Cher Horowitz to Brenda Walsh to Rachel Green.
For some the baby tee never went out of style, but it seems to be having a resurgence on the runways, and on It-girls who start trends whenever they “step out.” But it wasn’t a model or an influencer who sealed its comeback; the unexpected sign-off came from Lorde.
In late June, the pop superstar released Virgin, a sweeping Saturn-return banger with raw and visceral lyrics that detail the emotional and metaphorical score her body has kept as she’s grown up and into her power. Throughout the album’s 11 songs, a singular garment takes center stage: the baby tee. On the chorus of “GRWM,” which begins with her thoughts following a sexual dalliance, Lorde sings, “Maybe you’ll finally know who you wanna be/A Grown woman in a baby tee/A grown woman/Girl’s a grown woman.” Pitchfork called it “an objectively dumb lyric that she’s just confident enough to pull off.” Of course, it’s not really dumb at all but genius (sometimes it’s easy to mistake one for the other).
I was a faithful baby tee devotee throughout my teens and early 20s, but like everybody in fashion I started favoring giant oversized t-shirts sometimes in the last 10 years. A few seasons ago, when The Row produced a ridiculous super-thin baby tee with a graphic print of fried eggs and bacon, my raised-in-the-’90s-self immediately declared it a necessity. But when I put it on it made no sense on my 40-something body. Sure, I’d just had a baby, and, yes, we were all generally wearing “giant clothes,” but deep down there was the nagging question: Who would respect a grown woman in a baby tee?
When I heard Lorde sing “GRWM” and everything made sense. Being a grown woman in a baby tee is about embracing your own contradictions, understanding that although sometimes you need to leave a part of yourself behind in order to grow into a new part of you, sometimes you simply have to bring those parts along with you—and if you don’t know which event calls for which action that’s just dandy too. On the album opener she sings “I might’ve been born again/I’m ready to feel like I don’t have all the answers/There’s peace in the madness over our heads/Let me carry it up, up, up.”
Back in 1996, Pamela Anderson attended some event or other wearing a baby tee emblazoned with the GULF logo, except it said GIRL, the design stretching across her ample chest. I saw it in the pages of a teen magazine, which had captioned it with a kind of abrasive caption that said something along the lines of Thanks for the reminder, as if we would forget. Last year, the actress did a collaboration with Re/Done that included the iconic tee, this time with a bedazzled logo. Here was 57-year old Pamela, with no makeup and undone hair wearing her glittery GIRL tee like a ’90s teen dream. A grown woman in a baby tee, infinitely cooler than the first time around.
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