Granny Dress: It Girls Chose Frumpy on Purpose
It walked in through the front door wearing broderie anglaise and a high neckline and absolutely dared you to say something.
There is a particular kind of cultural power move that only becomes visible in retrospect — the moment when the most photographed women alive decide, collectively and without announcement, that the ugliest silhouette in recent memory is actually the point. The granny nightie trend did not sneak up on fashion. It walked in through the front door wearing broderie anglaise and a high neckline and absolutely dared you to say something.
Kaia Gerber wore one. Bella Hadid wore one. Olivia Rodrigo wore one. These are not women who dress accidentally. Every image they put into the world is a considered statement, and the statement this summer is: feminine does not mean flattering, and comfort does not mean laziness. The granny dress — floor-length, floaty, often cotton, occasionally embroidered, always slightly too large — is the anti-bodycon. It is the logical conclusion of a generation that grew up watching its predecessors shrink themselves into bandage dresses and decided not to.
What makes this interesting from a fashion architecture perspective is what the silhouette actually communicates. The granny nightie belongs to nobody's mother in any aspirational sense. It belongs to the woman who wears what she wants at 6am in her own garden, unbothered and unperformed. Styling it for summer — for the beach, the dinner, the candid street photo — is a deliberate act of reclamation. Brands like Free People and Doen have built entire aesthetic worlds around this logic: softness as strength, vintage as subversion, the domesticated made desirable.
Bella Hadid wearing this trend is also quietly interesting given where she has been publicly — the health journey, the stripped-back persona, the retreat from the maximalism that defined her earlier career. The granny dress reads on her not as a style choice but as a philosophy. Coverage of Bella Hadid and Adan Banuelos' relationship remaining deliberately ambiguous only adds to the sense of a woman who has decided to be legible on her own terms and no one else's. The clothes are part of that sentence.
Jane Seymour, meanwhile, is sitting in Malibu with two closets full of custom Chanel costumes and Escada runway samples, which is a different kind of not caring what anyone thinks — and equally admirable.
The granny nightie will be gone by autumn. But what it said about who gets to define feminine dressing in 2026 will take considerably longer to fade.
