As I prepared to attend night two of Sabrina Carpenter’s sold-out shows at London’s O2 arena, the last thing I wanted to do was plan a cutesy outfit.
I wear black almost exclusively, a habit leftover from a teenage desire to distance myself from all the trappings of femininity I felt I was above. In a high school full of girls trying to look like Britney Spears, I wanted to be Fran Lebowitz.
Though I’ve become (somewhat) less insufferable as the years have passed, I was still filled with an ancient dread at the idea of a stadium full of 20,000 young women and girls wearing pink gingham, babydoll dresses, lacy white socks, and glitter. Especially when I considered having to participate in all of that rhinestoney earnestness.
For those not compulsively online or plugged into pop music, Carpenter’s Short ‘n’ Sweet tour is the latest series of concerts for which fans have created a sort of unofficial dress code.
This growing trend was particularly noticeable during Taylor Swift’s record-breaking Eras Tour, with concert-goers meticulously planning the clothes they would wear to fit the aesthetic of each musical era from Swift’s career.
Chappell Roan took things to another level with her Midwest Princess Tour, announcing a theme for concertgoers outfits before each performance, with each prompt adhering to a song from her album.
When Carpenter exploded into a new level of stardom in 2024 – with her sixth studio album, Short n’ Sweet, debuting atop the Billboard 200, producing the top-three Hot 100 singles Espresso, Please Please Please, and Taste, and earning two Grammy Awards – she went through a major rebrand that has spawned a similar trend among her fans.
With a color palette of soft pastels and a tendency to wear 50s-style feathered negligees, evening gowns that look straight out of Sophia Loren’s closet, and Farrah Fawcett-style blonde curls, Carpenter’s aesthetic is distinctly feminine with a flirty, vintage, sparkly flavour.
Now, as hordes of fans pile into stadiums all over the world to watch the pop princess perform, they do so in outfits that mimic their favourite singer’s looks, often coordinating with their friends and posting ‘Short ‘n’ Sweet outfit inspos on Tiktok and Instagram.
It’s precisely the kind of phenomenon teenage-me would have rejected, branding it unbearably uncool and ‘normy’; possibly even arguing that it was somehow antithetical to the slow march of feminism (to which I felt I was contributing significantly by wearing combat boots to drama club).
When I woke up Sunday morning – now 28 and slightly more well-adjusted – to a text from a friend asking what outfit I planned to wear to the show, I felt the snarkiness that defined my adolescence rise up from within.
Before I could stuff it back in its cage, I responded: ‘Idk like jeans and a T-shirt. I’m an adult lol I don’t think I need to play dress up to go.’ In the moment, I subconsciously believed Judith Butler would be proud of me.
My friend responded before I’d even finished my morning coffee, writing: ‘Oh you’re too cool for whimsy?’
And then: ‘There will be like 10,000 teenage girls there who will have been planning their outfits for weeks and getting so excited to sing their favourite songs with their friends in a room full of glitter and pink hearts. And you want to be anti that kind of joy??? When the whole world tells girls that being happy and excited is uncool???’
At first, I rolled my eyes and put my phone down, continuing to sip my espresso (I also trained myself to drink black coffee as a teenager because that’s how Leonard Cohen took his…), but as the day wore on, the text started to bother me.
What took me the first half of my twenties to figure out is probably already extremely clear to anyone reading: My rejection of mainstream femininity in my adolescence came from a deep fear that if I were to try to fit in with other girls and like the things they liked, I would fail and face rejection.
Combine that with some internalised misogyny – a patriarchal belief that ‘girly’ things are inherently worse by nature of being related to women – and you have a toxic molotov cocktail of pretension that I’ve worked very hard to undo.
In high school, I wouldn’t have hated the idea of wearing matching outfits to a concert out of a genuine place of philosophical disagreement, but because I’d be scared to not be included in that kind of thing in the first place.
I had to then ask myself: In my late 20s, am I still acting like I’m better than wearing hearts to a Sabrina Carpenter show out of genuine self-possession, or because of entrenched, misogynistic biases I thought I was already past?
The answer meant that at about 4:30 pm on Sunday – with two-and-a-half hours until the concert started – I found myself cross-legged on my bedroom floor, trying fervently to cut a heart into the chest of the only remotely pink shirt I own. I even pulled up a YouTube tutorial.
After that, some nail glue, construction paper, and cutting up an old maroon T-shirt of my partner’s came together to create an ensemble so girly that as I looked in the mirror – wearing enough blush and lip liner to make Sabrina herself proud – I couldn’t help but giggle at the flirty little valentine standing where the fifth place runner up of a Patti Smith lookalike contest usually does.
MORE: Sabrina Carpenter’s Short ‘n’ Sweet tour show in London was tantalising but tame
When I got to the show itself, I watched as two groups of tweens – who clearly didn’t know each other beforehand – shyly and then, with increasing giggly excitement, bonded over their sparkly outfits.
As I made a fool out of myself dancing and singing along to Espresso as the concert concluded and confetti fell from the ceiling, I felt my inner teenager soften a little.
In fact, in a world in which joy is increasingly in short supply – especially for young girls who are so inundated by narratives about who they should be, how they should look, and what they should believe in – there’s actually something incredibly punk about dressing in sparkles and giggling in the face of anyone who would roll their eyes at your earnest excitement.
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As I watched two 13-year-old girls dressed in puffy-sleeve baby doll dresses hold each other as Sabrina sang Dumb & Poetic, I couldn’t help but feel grateful I’d capitulated and made my best effort at wearing something pink – if only to feel closer to all of the sparkly girlishness around me.
I think, deep down, my inner teenager might have even been smiling instead of scowling.
Sabrina’s UK tour concludes this summer with headline shows at BST Hyde Park on July 5 and 6, with tickets on sale now.
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