Are You a Good Girl or Bad Girl? Fashion Revisits a Familiar Divide

If there’s one clear idea to be gleaned from the spring/summer collections, it’s that women—and, by extension, their fashions—can more or less hew to one of two age-old poles: the good girl or the bad one. Or, to put it less delicately, “Madonna-Whore,” as Samantha once quipped in Sex and the City, while the foursome discussed newlywed Charlotte’s conjugal woes over brunch. “Trey sees you as his virginal wife, not his sexual plaything.”

Down the runways walked iterations of both archetypes: from the prim lady who lunches in a Palm Beach pink sweater and skirt set (Fendi) to the midriff-baring party girl in a Blow Pop red puffy jacket and low-slung jeans that reveal her flossy thong (McQueen); from the 1950s-era housewife in a floral apron and demure navy sweater ready to greet her husband at the doorway (Miu Miu) to the wild-child groupie scantily clad in rock ’n’ roll black leather (Givenchy). Wherever a woman fell on the continuum, however saintly or devilish she might feel, she could dress for it.

Is fashion returning to elemental ideas about women? Is this a retrograde reset after so much fluidity and freedom? In many ways, designers are merely crystallizing a theme that has been an undercurrent in popular culture for some time now. In the years since the pandemic, we’ve seen the rise of the “tradwife,” the contemporary avatar of Virginia Woolf’s Angel in the House, her famous 1931 metaphor for the saintly, self-sacrificing woman whose specter haunted Woolf as she wrote. These days, she’s the online “wifefluencer” in a prairie dress who posts on social media about some combination of homesteading, child-rearing, catering to your man, and cooking elaborate meals from scratch, all while surrounded by a brood of children in a kitchen decked out with pricey European appliances. It’s a nostalgic pipe dream, a fantasy of returning to a romanticized, if nonexistent, past when women conformed to traditional gender roles and devoted their lives to domesticity. This fairy tale offers women a retreat, however illusory, from professional and economic realities—never mind that many online tradwives are savvy entrepreneurs.

At the other end of the spectrum, one finds the amateur porn stars of OnlyFans, whose work is not wholly dissimilar from the trads’. These women also film themselves glammed up for online consumption—but rather than monetizing an exemplary lifestyle, they’re selling photos and videos of their bodies. Then there are adult film actors such as Lily Phillips and Bonnie Blue, who create extreme sexual content (last year Blue had sex with 1,057 men in 12 hours) with the ultimate goal of viral fame and cashing out. Stoking gender fury at either pole is lucrative.

The Virgin-Whore Complex, also known as the Madonna-Whore Complex (as in the Virgin Mary, not the pop star, and her antithesis), or, more decorously, the Madonna-Mistress Complex, was first observed in the early 20th century by the founder of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud. Writing in the wake of Victorian-era puritanism, Freud noted that many men experience a split between romantic love and carnal desire—viewing women as either pure and virtuous or sexualized and debased—and can only get aroused by the latter. “Where such men love they have no desire, and where they desire, they cannot love,” he wrote in 1912, labeling the disorder “psychic impotence.”

His dichotomy is now a pillar of feminist thought, widely recognized as the paradigm by which the patriarchy sorts all women into two camps—angels and devils, prudes and sluts. These broad gender stereotypes are used to shame and control. If you’re a woman living in a society, feminist thinkers have asserted, you’re not immune. As the radical feminist Andrea Dworkin wrote in “Whores,” a chapter from her 1981 book, Pornography: Men Possessing Women: “Within this system, the only choice for the woman has been to embrace herself as whore, as sexual wanton or sexual commodity within phallic boundaries, or to disavow desire, disavow her body.”

Dworkin’s furiously argued anti-pornography treatise, out of print since her death, in 2005, was reissued in paperback by Picador last year, along with her other seminal feminist texts, Woman Hating and Right-Wing Women. You might have noticed various lit girls posting photos of the candy-colored covers online. The books feel like crucial rejoinders to this cultural moment, when you can watch the live-action backlash against feminism among manosphere types online, all while many of the gains of the movement—professional, social, attitudinal, or otherwise—are being unwound or eroded. The abject state of things also surely explains the wild popularity of Margaret Atwood’s 1985 dystopian novel, The Handmaid’s Tale, and the 2017 show based on it, starring Elisabeth Moss. The narrative, set in a fictional male-dominated theocracy called Gilead, explores the Virgin-Whore concept directly: All women in society are classified along such lines, according to their relationships to men—as immaculate Wives (who dress in Virgin Mary blue); sinful but fertile Handmaids, enslaved as breeding vessels; near-invisible infertile domestic servants known as Marthas; or wicked, fallen prostitutes called Jezebels. (In April, Hulu is releasing a sequel series, The Testaments, set 15 years after the original and told from the alternating viewpoints of three female characters.)

On the runway, however, the theory didn’t always break down along such tidy lines. At Miu Miu, Miuccia Prada, who always reflects and refracts the culture in surprising ways, showed the apron in numerous incarnations, underscoring that it’s a garment favored not just by homemakers but also by butchers, factory workers, artists, cooks, waitresses, gardeners, and machinists. She offered long and short aprons, bejeweled or ruffled aprons, aprons as pinafores and aprons as blouses, variously done in cotton poplin, silk, lace, raw canvas, or leather. What at first seemed an uncomplicated token of bland domesticity was instead an homage to women’s labor in all forms, inspired by the documentary photographs of working-class life shot by Dorothea Lange and Helga Paris. At Prada, we saw a dirndl-like ensemble (a tan blouse embroidered with daisies over a fuchsia button-down, both paired with a white pleated skirt) that evoked the wholesome, traditional Alpine folk dress of Julie Andrews in The Sound of Music, as well as the saucy getup donned by Bavarian barmaids for Oktoberfest—two archetypes in one outfit.

Many of the buttoned-up good-girl looks were quietly titillating. At The Row, a Betty Crocker–inspired frock boasted a tight bodice and a skirt so voluminous that “you could imagine what’s going on underneath it,” as the heterosexual man I consulted on the matter noted. At Chanel, the brand’s standard polite suit was punked up with contrasting plaids and red accents. That subdued, repressed undercover types—librarians, businesswomen, professors—are often more alluring than those who bare it all is not exactly news. The eroticism lies in the tension between the cover-up and the possibility that exists beneath it. The racier fashions of spring/summer 2026 were not always overtly tarty either, at least not in the sense of vulgar or déclassé. Tom Ford’s sharply cut tuxedo blazer and sheer dress, held aloft by a choker-like string of fabric and worn over skimpy black undies, was chic and genuinely sexy—as the namesake designer always was and the brand under Haider Ackermann still is. You could imagine a woman in this outfit slinking around a members-only club at a casino in Monte Carlo; she might be on the arm of a high roller, or she could be the high roller herself. Elsewhere in the collections, naughtiness was leavened by a glimmer of primness, as with Colleen Allen’s ivory lace lingerie dress and Elisabetta Franchi’s white silk high-collar bodysuit and skirt. The pale colors lent these boudoir looks an aura of innocence.

In several cases, designers offered up parodies of bad-girl attire—i.e., those McQueen jeans, which land midway down the rear, and an assless leather skirt at Jean Paul Gaultier. Is there anything less appealing than an assemblage of bare butts? Glimpsing the models’ naked derrieres caused a cascade of generative associations: They reminded me of Yoko Ono’s infamous Film No. 4 (Bottoms), the 80-minute parade of naked backsides she made in 1966–67, and then of baboons, which got me thinking about humans’ animalistic nature, and the fact that the duality we’re really talking about is between primitivism and traditionalism. Are we surrendering to our baser self, or are we domesticating it?

Such a binary view of women—we’re all about sex; our sexiness needs to be corseted—is a return to the past, no matter how beautifully rendered or cheekily presented it may be. Why, I wondered, did designers insist on looking backward this season? Where were the gossamer new ideas, the utopianism, the sense of yearning? What does it mean when you’d rather revisit hoary notions of gender than imagine what comes next? Maybe, like a lot of us, they’re anxious about the onslaught of artificial intelligence flooding not just our feeds but also our lives, or about a future of intimacy with ChatGPT or humanoid robots. At least these women are distinctly human.

Hair by Joey George for Oribe at Streeters; makeup by Emi Kaneko for Victoria Beckham at R3 Management; manicure by Honey for Orly at Exposure NY. Model: Ella Rattigan at Supreme New York. Casting by Ashley Brokaw Casting. Set design by Marcs Bird at Bryant Artists.

Lighting Director: Eduardo Silva; Photo Assistant: Trisha Harmsen; Digital Technician: Nathaniel Jerome; Retouching: Cosmic Pixels; Fashion Assistants: Tori López, Kayla Perno; Hair Assistant: Courtney Peak; Makeup Assistant: Wakana Ichikawa; Set Assistant: Bayard Morse; Tailor: Elise Marie Fife at Altered Management.