The Olivia Rodrigo Guide to Girl-Power Menswear

For every stop of her sold-out Guts World Tour, the singer Olivia Rodrigo hits the stage wearing a sent-up version of a complicated menswear artifact: the ribbed white tank top. She dons it ’90s Gwen Stefani-style, with the hemline hacked off at the midriff. Each night, Rodrigo deploys a new cropped tank printed with a different pithy catchphrase—“I kiss better than I cook,” “Ur mom,” or, in a direct nod to Stefani’s 1995 No Doubt hit, “I’m just a girl”—that recasts the plain garment as pointed stagewear.

(For her first New York City concert, Rodrigo’s “Carrie Bradshaw AF” shirt was appropriately cosmopolitan.)

Rodrigo’s usual tour wardrobe of combat boots, ripped fishnet tights, miniskirts is punkish, youthful, and proudly girly. It’s akin to her casual dressing off stage, where she incorporates easygoing, menswear-ish pieces (not unlike the ensembles of another Los Angeles-based Gen Z creative, Malia Obama) in a manner that also feels punkish and proudly girly.

One recent chilly spring morning in between her sold-out MSG shows, she wore a black-and-white bouclé tweed coat and faded black jeans with a prim white dress shirt, thick-soled Doc Martens, and a rolled-up black beanie. She repurposed a few of the same garments some days later, rotating in a hefty wool overcoat and a pair of beat-up black Adidas Sambas—a shoe whose menswear bonafides have extended its popularity far beyond its intended consumers (indoor soccer players) to, now, pop stars and prime ministers.