The babydoll dress is a curious piece. It’s one part adorable, and one part sexy. The adorable part is easy to see – the short cut and loose fit makes it look a lot like the dresses worn by infant dolls. On younger children, the dress looks absolutely darling.

The sexy part, on the other hand, comes mainly from two inspirations. The first is 1960′s sex symbol Carroll Baker, who wore the dress in one of her earlier films, Baby Doll. In the movie, she played childish 19-year old Baby Doll Meighan, who becomes the object of a business rival’s seduction. Her penchant for dressing in short babydoll dresses and sucking her thumb while she slept created an interesting mix of naiveté and sensuality. The film actually gave the babydoll dress its name. More importantly, it started the trend of adults wearing these dresses made originally for kids.

The babydoll dress eventually went out of vogue over the years, until one wild fashion icon brought it back into the spotlight. Grunge rocker Courtney Love started wearing the dress in the early 90′s as part of her look. Combining the subtle sexiness of the dress with an overtly sexual attitude, Love reignited the babydoll’s popularity and helped create a brand-new Lolita-esque trend. Since then, the babydoll dress has been a popular part of mainstream fashion, inspiring Generation X and beyond to dress their sexuality in a fun, innocent-looking outfit.

Thanks to Baker and Love, the babydoll dress as we know it today is feminine, flattering, and fiercely sensual. You’ll sometimes find a babydoll dress or two at the Dresses and Skirts section of Ukay Manila. If you ever want to try exploring a sexier look,while looking undeniably sweet at the same time, why not give the babydoll a shot? You might just “Love” it.

“Baby Doll” capture from YouTube; Courtney Love photo from www.enjoy-your-style.com

We often come across ukay sellers who call their items “vintage”, a word you’ll rarely find at Ukay Manila. It isn’t because we dislike vintage clothes (in fact, we LOVE them), but there’s a difference between what’s ukay and what’s truly vintage.

Vintage clothing belongs to another fashion era, like a fun flapper dress from the 20′s or a gorgeous Victorian cameo necklace. This vintage buying guide suggests that clothes are considered vintage if they’re from the 60′s or earlier, making them at least 50 years old. We often get these clothes second-hand, either from a store or as a hand-me-down from our moms. They allow us to wear something from the past, when the trends were different, yet timeless. There’s a certain joy to wearing something with old-world glamour, or the antiquated “freshness” of a Bohemian dress. Of course, real vintage clothing tends to sell at a pretty high price, since the pieces are very rare.

Ukay, like vintage clothing, is second-hand, but that’s where the similarity ends. Ukay clothing usually doesn’t come from a past era, so it doesn’t hold that unique romantic feel real vintage apparel holds. Sure, we might get really lucky and find a true vintage dress in an ukay-ukay, but the odds of that happening are really small. The best we can do with ukays is find vintage-inspired clothing, where designs from decades ago are found on clothes made yesterday.  Since these clothes are easier to find, they’re a lot less expensive than vintage clothes, and easier to wear, too.

At Ukay Manila, you’ll find a lot of vintage-inspired clothes that are just as pretty as the real thing. We’ve also got accessories to accentuate them in our Trinket Box. Although we don’t necessary sell vintage clothing, we definitely offer you the look.