Sabrina Carpenter is sometimes compared to Bratz dolls and often to Polly Pocket. That’s because she’s a) blonde, b) no more than 5 feet tall, and c) wearing babydoll dresses and plastic platform heels. (In her own words, she’s “small and cute.”) But when I first saw a photo of the pop star in a calf-length plaid skirt earlier this week, I was reminded of another tortured female singer.
“She wasn’t a pioneer in terms of fashion; she left that to her work,” Devers said of the late poet’s 2021 uniform. “This dress represents Plath and her personality in every way — the inner struggle, the artistic demons within her, and is covered in the most precise, almost delicate fabrics. The clothes she wears will never go out of style and the quality is good, durable. Carpenter is probably the last person in the culture to be compared to Plath — although she would certainly have a song named “Daddy” — and she’s probably the last person I would want to see photographed in a brown and bookish outfit.”
After all, this is the same person who sang on a toilet seat on a Barbie Dreamhouse-style stage; the same person who made fun of “69” and wrote a song called “Nonsense,” though he’s also famous for coining the phrase “That’s me, Espresso.” And yet… Rhymes, repetitions, semantic shifts, transformations, intentionally awkward syntax, and rich double meanings — to some, Carpenter is the greatest poet of all time. “If you want to call me Polly Pockets or Bratz Doll, I don’t care,” the musician herself said recently. “You’ll meet me and say, ‘Oh, she talks even better than the dolls.'”
