Within minutes, the caustic admonishments started flooding in. One Facebook user received more than 200 likes for writing: "Wow, 16 going on 25. Those dresses are real hoochie." (Hoochie, in case you don't know, is American slang for "a young woman who has many casual sexual partners or who dresses or behaves in a sexually provocative way".)
Another wrote that Ramsay's daughters were "advertising [that] something very precious is for sale to the lowest bidder. Please, Dad, keep her innocence a little longer. Teach her to respect herself."
And on it went. "These girls' parents are just asking for it...", "How do they possibly let them dress that way?", "17? to 20-year-old boys will be thinking they are easy pickings", "Don't think enough of themselves to not dress like prostitutes for attention..."
Easy pickings? Asking for it? I hadn't heard these absurd expressions since the Seventies, when out-of-touch county court judges used to apply them to mini-skirted rape victims.
Have a look at the picture. The girls are wearing sparkly party dresses, minis and rah-rah skirts. Their legs are bare. There's maybe a bit of tummy on show; hair straightened or tonged into Disney-ish curls. Make-up and jewellery is minimal to the point of invisibility. No tattoos or piercings are evident.
As a father of two daughters myself, this simply looked like very modern snapshot of happy, wholesome and conventional family life.
Well, I've got news for the Ramsay teen trollers: when you consider all the images of porn, genital selfies, excess, hyperreality and casual misogyny that every teenage girl has access to on the web, all the grimly sexist gangsta rap and omnipresent Kardashian behinds that pass for entertainment these days, sparkly mini-dresses and bare legs are the very least of a father's concerns.
When I see that picture of the Ramsays heading for their party, the ever-protective father in me is not outraged or shocked. Instead, I'm thinking: in 2015, this is what demure looks like.
Five years ago, my eldest daughter had her own 16th birthday. The photos show Laurie and her friends at a restaurant dressed almost identically to the Ramsayettes. Laurie wore a short skirt (but I think her mum's was even shorter), her eye make-up had those little flicks that Amy Winehouse had made fashionable.
I remember being shocked by how grown-up she looked. The days of her parading around the house in a Snow White outfit from the Disney Store seemed to have passed by in a flash. She'd gone from breast milk to prosecco in a blink.
OK, if - and really only if - you happen to be the father of girls who dress in such a way, you might think to yourself: "Eek, dresses a bit short, girls..." But being a wise, experienced and tactful sage of a parent - and knowing full well that any clumsy, badly timed observation will be ignored, ridiculed (by both daughters and their mum...) and make you sound like some uptight, party-pooping Victorian - you keep it to yourself.
I need not have worried. The fierce, intellectually superior, scarily tall girls were very much in charge that night - and, needless to say, far from the aforementioned "easy pickings"... while the boys were bashful, clumsy and awkward.
There was a bit of cheeky tab smoking outside and an interlude of mildly out-of-hand podium dancing to Pharrell and Jay-Z. But here's the thing: in the ensuing half-decade, none of the girls has fallen into prostitution. None are pregnant or substance-dependent.
And, as far as I know, their clothing has not engendered any form of sexual assault. But, still, it is apparently OK for trolls to think that girls dressed like this are "asking for it".
As a modern dad, it can be very confusing. I was someone who grew up in a house with only an older brother as a sibling, so watching my daughters change from toddlers to teens was an education.
Especially where clothes were involved. As a boy, you can wear what you like, all your life. A shirt and tie at a wedding. No brown in town. That's it. Men who doll themselves up in an overtly, provocatively "sexy" manner are considered, by both sexes, a bit of a joke.
Tight, revealing clothing on a man makes him look a doofus and, unless you happen to be Russell Brand, no male has ever been accused of dressing like a jail-baiting manwhore who is "asking for it".
With Madeleine and Laurie, it was different. Regulated dress codes concerning exposed flesh, cleavage, hem lengths, etc, were everywhere, all of them based on the ludicrous, scare-mongering assumption that men (and boys) are untrustworthy, impulsive sex pests, incapable of displaying anything approaching self-control.
The truth is, for a teenage girl, a junior bra, a thing for mini-skirts and high heels comes well in advance of any bona fide sexual awakening. But before they've had a chance to morph smoothly into young women, the finger-wagging fun police are telling them that their bare legs will get them into trouble.
Jose Mourinho behaved impeccably earlier this year when he accompanied Matilde, his 18-year-old daughter, to the GQ Awards. I'm sure the Chelsea manager took a deep, paternal breath when she walked towards their waiting limo that night, wearing a tuxedo jacket and not much else. But it would've been so wrong of him to tell her to go back in the house and change. Instead, he stood next to her on the red carpet... beaming proudly.
Today, the mini-dresses still come out for parties and nightclubs, but Laurie is much more likely to adopt tomboyish Alexa Chung as a sartorial role model than she is Beyonce. Of course, there have been a few fashion?related shockers along the way (since when did it become acceptable for young girls to dress as blood-soaked Barbie-harlots for Halloween?), but the worst thing I could say about them is that they look a bit scruffy and poorly insulated - all of which you can get away with when you are 21.
One of my daughter's friends is studying to be an architect; another has a job in the City. Laurie herself works in film. Evidently, a sparkly mini doesn't make a teenager stupid but, as the trolls have proven this week, it does seem to make adults draw the dumbest of misinformed conclusions.
My hope is that the next generation, my 16-year-old daughter Maddie's generation, will be smarter, worldlier, less prudishly judgmental. The sexualisation of a teenage girl's body is her own business, no one else's.
And as Gordon Ramsay rightly said in response to his daughters' trolls: "My job is to teach my son how to respect girls."
In Maddie's short lifetime, she has now seen so many young wannabe Madonnas in basques doing the "burlesque" thing that trussed-up armour and fishnet stockings have ceased to have any libidinous context.
At sweet 16 years old, she now dresses less in the style of a Kardashian and more like Cate Blanchett in Todd Haynes's sumptuous movie, Carol.
When she is getting ready for a party, my response is more likely to be "wow" than, "You are not going out dressed like that."
Teenage girls just want to have fun, and what is fashionable will come and go, like it always has. We should let them get on with it. Wear your sparkly mini-dress with pride, and shame on the slut-shamers. #GoRamsayGirls!
- The Daily Telegraph
