What’s with all the outcry about bloomers and baby-doll dresses?

In recent weeks, Olivia Rodrigo, Madonna and Sana have been criticized for ultra-girly and leg-baring choices. Rodrigo caught heat after performing in a baby-doll dress with bloomers beneath last month in Spain. She also wears bloomers, running the halls of Versailles in her “Drop Dead” video variations of what amounts to ruffled underwear.

Madonna, who championed the underwear as outerwear trend in the 1990s, also came under fire after wearing a Dolce & Gabbana corseted top and ruffled satin bloomers for a surprise concert in Times Square earlier this month. And during a pop-up performance with Twice in Seoul last week, the K-pop singer’s floral asymmetric dress exposed her lace-trimmed underwear, which caused a backlash on social media. Interestingly, her bandmate Tzuyu’s frilly bloomers with garter-type ties did not fan flames on social media.

Afterward, Sana posted on social media that she had ensured during a fitting that the outfit would not gape open and that she was too distracted to check in a mirror before taking to the stage. Her ensemble was said to have been designed by Bonbom Jo. Media requests to the company were not returned.

More forthright about her choice, the 23-year-old Rodrigo told The New York Times’ “Popcast” that “what’s really disturbing” is that she has worn more revealing outfits on stage. “Like, I’ve been on stage in like a sparkly bra, little shorts, which is my right. That’s fun. I felt cool and comfortable in that. And that wasn’t ‘inappropriate’ — but me fully covered up in a dress that people deem to be childlike was inappropriate,” the three-time Grammy winner said.

Rodrigo continued, “I think it shows how we really normalize pedophilia in our culture,” the singer added. “And also it’s just this rhetoric that we’re fed as girls since we’re so little, which is like, ‘Don’t wear that because then a man is going to sexualize your body and it’s your fault.’ Like, it’s so weird.”

Ironically, or not, bloomers are named for the journalist and Suffragist Amelia Bloomer, who advocated for women to abandon rigid corsets and heavy petticoats in favor of trousers, shorter skirts, and sensible boots. She also edited and published The Lily, the first political newspaper that was for women and produced by them.

Asked about Rodrigo, Madonna and Sana, Sara Catterall, author of “Amela Bloomer: Journalist, Suffragist, Anti-Fashion Icon,” said, “I hope they can brush all of it off. All three were making public appearances, and none of them were wearing anything that couldn’t have been worn on a stage in the 1890s.”

Recalling how micro minidresses with matching underwear were a street-wide style 50 years ago, Catterall said bloomers were the last thing that Bloomer wanted to be remembered for. But in 1851, Bloomer went viral for promoting a “Turkish dress,” a knee-length skirt over trousers, which she wore for health reasons. “She did not invent it, and only wore it for about six years, but journalists attached her name to it. Over time, that name was attached to swimwear, and underwear.”

More recently, style setters like Sabrina Carpenter, Emma Chamberlain, and Vanessa Hudgens have turned up wearing bloomers. Fittingly, the garment’s namesake “was always very clear in her belief that what a person chose to wear was their business alone, and that conventional clothes did not define character,” Catterall said.

While baby-doll dresses can be “very rock ‘n’ roll,” Matthew Yokobosky, senior curator of fashion and material culture at the Brooklyn Museum, noted how Courtney Love wore baby-doll dresses on stage and her late husband Kurt Cobain had, too. Rodrigo hailed Love and Kathleen Hanna for her baby-doll style on “Popcast.” She said that she felt that she looked like them, “all these people who are my heroes, and I felt cool and comfortable in it.”

A representative for Hanna “politely declined” to comment about the controversy.

But Rodrigo’s and Sana’s fashion takes hark back to Tokyo’s Harajuku neighborhood, where “that look is still be worked today,” he said. “I don’t see them disappearing, since we don’t have strict clothing rules. There’s a you-can-wear-anything attitude. I saw girls wearing these rustic babydoll dresses yesterday.”

The ultra-girly fashion traces back to the 1997 feature film “Lolita,” which was based on Vladimir Nabokov’s 1955 novel by the same name, Yokobosky said. “I don’t think they will ever go out of style.”

Dôen, Miu Miu, Chloé, Jaded London, Oddli, Revolve, Louisiella, Victoria’s Secret, Free People and Love & Lemons are among the brands that sell bloomers. The style is aligned with “Lolita”-type frilly ankle socks and girly eyelet trim ones that many women are pairing with Mary Jane flats this summer.

Fashion historian Cassidy Zachary, whose Instagram is the Art of Dress, said, “Moral panic and outrage over how women choose to dress their bodies is nothing new. Historically, what women put on their bodies was intimately linked to societal ideals surrounding gender propriety and respectability.”

Madonna, Rodrigo and Sana are following in the footsteps of the boundary-pushing actresses, singers, and dancers that bucked societal norms “by daring to bare in the public eye, while performing,” she said. “However, society has progressed a lot since the days when women could not show an ankle much less their thighs without coming under immense scrutiny.”

Zachary suggested that the recent outcry may be related to the broader political climate in the U.S. and that women’s rights are being challenged. “It should come as no surprise that women’s right to dress is coming under attack at the very same moment that her rights to autonomy over her body are being challenged and taken away. The two are intimately connected,” she said.

Separately, the case of Madonna’s missing costumes after her April 18 performance with Carpenter at Coachella is still open, according to Sergeant Abraham Plato of the Indio Police Department in Indio, Calif. Evidence shows they may have fallen off a golf cart as they were being transported to the tour bus, he said Friday. There was no mention of bloomers, as an itemized list of the missing items was not available.