Lace and Feminism. How Sabrina Carpenter is Redefining Female Empowerment
A pair of sheer white tights, ruffled pink shorts, a lot of blush, a heart drawn on the cheek, a mesh corset with a bow in the front (literal lingerie! ), satin kitten heels, pearls.
This outfit is the perfect recipe to feel like the most attractive woman alive, like a girl with a fun and cool Halloween costume (Marie Antoinette, but without the gown), like the most confident version of myself. It was the perfect recipe to feel good about my body, my stylistic choices, about the pink and the lace and the pearls that all echoed my childhood dream to be a princess, to be a queen. It felt good to look good, and it felt like I was such a good feminist because I was feeling great about my body, my sexuality, and myself.
It is also the perfect recipe to feel like a bad feminist for sexualizing a historical figure and for playing into the whole idea of sexy Halloween costumes, as though there is nothing else I can do. For giving society exactly what I was trained to do—dress for the “male gaze," show off my body, my face, and my imagination to get attention, even though men were the last thing on my mind.
This look is the perfect recipe for having the most vigorous internal conflict of how to be a good feminist while dressing sexy, enjoying looking sexy, and feeling guilty for enjoying looking sexy.
In this day and age, some women feel like they are breaking free from the limitations and frames imposed on them historically. We are empowered, opinionated, and free to do whatever we do with our looks, careers, bodies (well...) and lives in general. However, as much as we love to say that women are fully emancipated, the narratives that have been repeated to us for so many years are sometimes impossible to escape. And slut-shaming is a big one.
Some women still feel uncomfortable wearing open clothing, having bold make-up, or expressing their sexuality for many reasons. One of them is, of course, safety, but another is shaming. And the shaming comes from both sides of the feminist conversation. People slut-shame because they think a woman is supposed to be modest and quiet, or they slut-shame them because they are convinced women are not supposed to play into the idea of femininity the patriarchy built for us. There is no way to win.
As I was putting on another layer of blush before stepping out of my dorm in that Halloween costume, all of these thoughts were rushing through my head. I came back to reality at one moment and heard Sabrina Carpenter's song “Bed Chem” playing in my room. I pictured Sabrina on stage in her little lingerie outfit she usually wears for her new tour. How beautiful, sexy, free, and confident she is in those looks. I then remembered the hate that she gets for them.
How am I supposed to feel okay with the potential public’s response to my appearance when people can’t even handle a pop star singing about sex or wearing short skirts as part of her stage costumes?
Sabrina Carpenter was your usual Disney star, with innocent, child- and parent-friendly songs, videos, and performances. With her last two albums, Emails I Can’t Send (2022) and Short and Sweet (2024), she delved into her sexy, pin-up era in terms of songwriting and costume choices. The rebranding was totally obvious with the launch of the Short and Sweet Tour, where the singer appears in revealing outfits, dancing sexually, and singing spicy lyrics. The reaction to this change from an innocent child pop-star to a grown woman with explicit imagery and texts created a lot of backlash amongst fans, their parents, feminists, and basically anyone who has access to the internet.
The tour has been on the road since September, and the Twitter threads have gotten progressively more hateful towards Sabrina’s looks and moves on stage. The Polyester Magazine podcast made an episode discussing the recent criticism Sabrina got for her stage outfits, and although the podcast focused on Sabrina’s sexy doll-like image and how it can be problematic, the issue I saw in the story was the never-ending urge of the public to criticize sexually open women.
The podcast hosts Ione Gamble and Gina Tonic discuss the tweets that were targeted against Sabrina and her stage presence. One user tweeted, “I’m 17 and afraid of Sabrina Carpenter when she’s performing,” another, “Why is Sabrina dancing so sexually at her shows when children are there?” referencing the singer’s choreography, lyrics, and lingerie costumes. After listening to the episode, I decided to dig deeper into the Twitter hate hole myself and found tweets like "Sabrina Carpenter hypersexualizes herself," “sexualizes herself for money," “only wears lingerie," “is degrading to women,” and “I find her performances unsettling.”.
I found myself scrolling endlessly through piles of hateful comments about Sabrina's appearance and work and was surprised when I realized that I wasn’t that shocked by the public’s hate. I was familiar with these voices. I was familiar with these comments. Attacking women for their open sexuality has never gone anywhere, even though we might sometimes feel like it. This narrative exists everywhere you look, and that’s why I felt paralyzed looking at myself in the mirror in my “potentially too sexy” Halloween costume.
To get some sense of the hate, the reason behind it, and what Sabrina Carpenter’s actual intent was, I decided to look into her career and image up to this point.
During my research, I stumbled upon an online video series on Instagram by @zoeunlimited explaining the seemingly overnight success of Sabrina Carpenter and her
journey to the massive media following, music popularity, and therefore the close attention of the modest fashion police.
Sabrina started out as a young teenage actor on the Disney Channel show “Girl Meets World." The show was having disappointing ratings and got canceled after a few seasons. The brightest star to come out of that show was Sabrina. She signed a record deal for five albums with Hollywood Records and recorded them in the image of a modest child pop star.
As Zoe mentions in her video series, Carpenter’s career was doomed by the “Disney curse” at the time, as her music and image were targeting a young audience, hence the age-appropriate, well, everything. However, if we know something about teenagers, they want nothing to do with age-appropriate. Her target audience was listening to Ariana Grande, Selena Gomez, and Miley Cyrus, who at this point in their careers were already fully shedded from the Disney curse and were making art that made sense for a grown woman. Something all teenage girls wanted to be.
Sabrina signed a record deal with Island Records in 2019, and in 2022 the world was blessed with a new era of her music and image. She stepped into her rebranding.
From the very first steps in her new image, she provoked the public. The album featured a song “Because I Liked a Boy,” where she refers to the media calling her a whore for dating an ex of Olivia Rodrigo, which was one of the biggest scandals in her career. Olivia Rodrigo wrote her hit song “Drivers Licence,” mentioning “a blonde girl” who was hanging out with her ex-boyfriend Joshua Bassett. It was a nod to Carpenter. The first wave of hate hit Sabrina when that song came out, and the public was calling her a “homewrecker” and a “slut” for taking another girl’s man. Which was not true, but even if it was, the public’s response was so strong, so hateful, and so quick to judge, leaving no space for another narrative, just another story of slut-shaming.
“Because I Liked a Boy," a song where Sabrina mentions all the hate that she got and how misogynistic the public’s responses were, was the song that led to Sabrina developing her 50s-inspired wardrobe. Ironically, the emergence of this new style was one of the sparks that ignited the recent hateful commentary on her overly sexualized costumes.
Other songs from that album also played a part in Sabrina’s more mature image. “Skinny Dipping” was a song where she shared raw and personal details of her past relationship, delving deeper into her personal life, distancing herself from the cookie-cutter lyrics of her past. However, the song that kicked off her flirty image and determined the direction of her branding was "Nonsense,” which featured a number of spicy lyrics provoking the listener, especially if they compared it to the previous version of Sabrina.
This song was the start of Sabrina’s exploration of her style of performing. Every night on her Emails I can’t Send tour, she would perform Nonsense as a closing song, changing the last lines every night to fit the city she was performing in, while also adding some very provocative lyrics, for example, “Everything is bigger here in Dallas; Cowboys call me if you want to practice; make some noise if you would ever tap this.” What started out as an improv joke turned into Sabrina’s signature—something she became known for but also something that caused her a lot of backlash when her audience grew.
The success of her second album with Island Records, Short and Sweet, was vast. The album debuted at number one on the US Billboard 200 chart, marking Carpenter's first number one and top-10 album and best opening week to date. Her listening audience grew immensely; the songs were playing on the radio the whole summer, and her tour gave her even more publicity.
With the new album, the singer very obviously knew exactly what her brand was. At this point she was already working with Jared Ellner as her stylist, feeling very confident in her
established 50s pin-up aesthetic, singing about her sexuality, and knowing that people loved it. And that’s when the clash happened.
The growing audience, the Disney past, the revealing outfits, and provocative lyrics all came together to produce the narrative of Sabrina Carpenter “oversexualizing herself." A narrative that unfortunately was expected but is definitely not based on anything substantial.
Sabrina’s recent video for Vogue with her stylist explains the structure, meaning, and inspiration behind everything that happens during her show. The performance is supposed to feel like a night out with the girls.
It starts in Sabrina’s room, in her robe or towel, as she is getting ready. In this part, she sings slower songs of hers, starting the night. The singer drew inspiration from movies like “Bye Bye Birdie” and “Grease” for her outfits and stage design to capture the feel of “the girlies getting ready." She then changes into her Swarovski corset and pairs it with a sparkly garter and platform shoes. Then she puts on a lace bodysuit inspired by Marylin Monroe in “There is No Business Like Show-Business” and Audrey Hepburn in “Funny Face." She ends the night with her most fun and spicy songs in her bejeweled two-piece look inspired by the Abba Voyage Show. This is the part where she continues the tradition of sexy improv with her new song "Juno," where she mimics a new sexual position every night.
As Sabrina and her stylist Jared get excited to tell the audience of the video about the ideas and work behind her tour image, I get excited with them. I get excited about the lace and the sparkles and the garters, like I was excited about my pink ruffles and pearls on Halloween. Sabrina and her team made the show into a girly heaven with flowy bathrobes, Abba, platform shoes, Audrey Hepburn, and the unparalleled joy that girls feel getting ready together.
At the end of the video, she looks at her stylist and says, "The girls are going to love it.”.
I smile.
When you look at it from the inside, at least for me, the Short and Sweet show and Sabrina's branding in general seem like a lot of hard work, talent, great creative vision, and immense confidence and will to have fun. Despite the hateful comments she receives about her appearance and songs,.
In the endless fight against the patriarchy and battling on many sides of the argument, there has to come a point where you look in the mirror, standing in your kitten heels and lace corset as Marie Antoinette, thinking, "Which narrative should I choose?”. Do I look like the most attractive and confident version of myself, or am I objectifying myself and degrading women?
Well, I think only I can say which one it is.
Sexually open women are always going to be threatening, always an easy target to choose, always something easy to hate and attack before you analyze the work, talent, and imagination that goes into anything that woman does. Sabrina Carpenter is doing so much for the female community by allowing us to feel sexy when we want to, have fun when we want to, and continue doing it despite the backlash. Sabrina Carpenter is a good feminist. She is doing it for the girls.
