What is happening to children’s clothes? With each passing year I feel they are morphing into adults’ wear.
In a few years’ time we won’t have children’s clothes shops at all and instead we’ll have outlets that stock the same item of clothes for all ages starting from babies to size 18. Halter-neck black number? You’ll find it on the racks for a six-month-old baby girl, a size 6 teenager, as well as for a size 14 grandmother.
It has become a quest for me buying clothes for my (tall) nine-year-old daughter. This is what’s mostly available for children in that age bracket in shops in Malta: black dresses, black halter tops, cropped tops, shoes with heels, tight-fitting sequined dresses and T-shirts which have ‘Look here’ printed on the chest or ‘I’m easy’ or ‘Boys, boys, boys’. I wouldn’t even say they are clothes suitable for grown women – I mean: would you wear them?
No, I’m afraid that this is what I call the ‘tarty fashion’ which has taken over the shops.
When my grandmother was a child, it used to be very straightforward. Boys wore shorts until they reached a certain height or maturity. Then typically around puberty, they would receive their first pair of long trousers. Girls had their own rite of passage too: young girls wore knee-length dresses, or high-collared blouse and knee-length skirt, matched with socks and shoes. Upon puberty, their bonnets became hats and they started wearing gloves to go to Mass.
Of course, that changed over the decades, but there was always some sort of ‘dress code’ crossing over ritual. For example, when we were young, Confirmation was the milestone for girls to wear tiny kitten heels.
As I type, I’m thinking of the Italian pink shoes, with a tiny strap and a half an inch spool heel I wore on the day. You see, I was more excited about those shoes than becoming ‘a soldier of Christ’. But the combination of both, and the fuss and ceremony about the whole thing, made me realise deep down that hey, this was a special day and I could now boss my younger sister even more because I had worn heels and she still hadn’t. It was a tiny step towards the realisation that I was growing older.
This is what I call the ‘tarty fashion’ which has taken over the shops
Over the generations the lines kept blurring, until today it looks to me like there is absolutely no rite of passage whatsoever – no pattern of an adolescent journey followed by a gradual transition into adulthood. Aesthetically, it has become very confusing: girls wear outfits that make them look like miniature adults from the age of three. I find this more worrying than people wearing burqas.
For a minute, I was going to start pointing fingers at those flipping Disney princesses, particularly that white-haired Elsa-Let-It-Go one, who sashays down a frozen mountain in a slinky skirt with a side seam slit. Or those Bratz dolls – ugly, horrid versions of Barbies – who wear vampy clothes. But you know what? It’s not fair.
Italian, French, Spanish, Luxembourgish children also watch Frozen on a loop, and I suppose Bratz have also reached their toy shops, but children there dress like children until they are grown-ups.
Little girls on the continent don’t wear T-shirts with ‘So Many Boys, So Little Time’ on them. Instead they wear sensible dresses and trousers until they are reach their teens and then they graduate to jeans and polo shirts. They wear pretty floaty dresses, sandals and socks, T-shirts with pictures of cute cats or butterflies. They wear innocent whites, creams and pastel shades. They don’t wear black. They don’t look like ludicrously teeny women. And they are children until they grow up.
For people who want to adopt this traditional style for their children, it is not easy here. The shops are not of much help because they follow the trends in the UK and the US, where the demand for slutty children’s clothes seems to be high.
I very much fear that in the long run this will prove to be a problem for society. If our children do not live their childhood as children, then they will grow up into adults behaving like children. And God knows we have enough of those around already.
Therefore, we owe it to our children to give them a rite of passage – and what clothes they wear is an important part of it. So please, shops, start stocking pretty little floaty frocks and make my shopping much easier.
krischetcuti@gmail.com
Twitter: @KrisChetcuti