Earlier this month, to celebrate a Spotify-streaming milestone, the singer Olivia Rodrigo held an intimate concert in Barcelona while wearing a certain outfit: a floral baby-doll dress, pink bloomers, and knee-high leather boots. The getup almost immediately set off an online maelstrom. Some commenters accused her of dressing like a “sexy baby” and promoting “pedo core” (short for “pedophilia core”); others defended her right to dress however she pleases. Rodrigo, though, appeared to have specific references in mind: In a recent interview, she noted that she’s currently inspired by artists such as Kat Bjelland and Courtney Love, who paired baby-doll dresses with punk rock in the 1990s to repudiate the fetishization of girlhood. But those artists, too, were disparaged for the look back then—one reviewer in 1994 called Love’s style that of a “raddled Baby Jane whose notion of clothes-shopping is to lie in a skip outside a paedophile brothel.” And critiques of the style reached into the world of fashion more broadly. After Giorgio Armani and Anna Sui featured baby-doll dresses and pleated skirts …