Great suggestion indeed, but I have to ask: What part of boys wearing leggings would be the awesome part?
Try shopping outside of department stores. Etsy or here: http://www.polarnopyretusa.com/ or many others.
Superhero, robot, pirate, animal (including ponies), fairy and fireman sections would be awesome.
I would love to see kids clothes organized in a more unisex manner, or just less pink on the girlâs sections in general.
Also, dude, leggings are comfy.
The part where they are comfortable, and allow for a greater range of movement than little boyâs jeans.
But what about PRETTY or SPARKLY?
My first thought is that is too many categories, and also not enough. Theyâre too specific. Itâs hard not to define a category, like âprettyâ that would pretty much just be the girls section again.
Iâm thinking more like:
FORMAL (button down shirts, slacks, fancy dresses)
FUN (T shirts, shorts, sundresses)
PAJAMAS (self explanatory)
Or we could just address the underlying complaint: Too much girl stuff is overly pink and âgirlyâ, thereâs too little variety.
My wife has the same complaint. Our little girl is only 5 months old, but already she has given away garbage bags full of pink hand-me-downs (from other parents) because she canât stand overly pink girls clothes. Itâs a struggle to find a nice green dress or purple onesie for her. Luckily babies are all pretty much the same at this age so she can wear boy clothes just fine, but I wonder what itâs going to be like in a few years. She may end up being a girly girl and love pink anyway, to her Momâs chagrin.
I hated jeans as a kid for just that reason. As a nerd who didnât care what anyone thought of how he looked, I ended up wearing pretty much all sweatpants until high school, and even then it took sustained prompting from both my older sisters to change my ways.
Ah, shades of horrible things to come. My mother-in-law had tubs of hand-me-down baby clothes sorted by âgirlâ, âboyâ and âgender neutralâ. In reality, they were basically âgirlâ, ânormal human beingâ, and âplain white onesiesâ. We took home all three and Althea will wear a mixture. But I really really really really really am already hating the little girl clothing industry that treats small female people as strange creatures that are only interested in pink, sparkles, and shopping princesses. Itâs vile.
I used to shop for my daughterâs clothes in the boysâ department for the simple reason that she was really rough on her clothes and the girly clothes were just not made as tough. Boysâ clothes were also cut more generously. It worked great until she was around age 5, when the other girls at daycare convinced her that she had to wear pink and only pink. Thankfully sheâs expanded her wardrobe choices in the last few years.
We didnât tell anyone what gender our baby was going to be until she was born, which meant that we got more neutral colored clothes as gifts. Our hero was a friend who sent us a number of onesies in earthy colors from a sensible shop in Germany. We still get quite a lot of hand-me-downs from other parents, but unfortunately now thereâs a definite pink bias in the clothes weâre given.
It worked great until she was around age 5, when the other girls at daycare convinced her that she had to wear pink and only pink.
Ugh I hate the fact that this brainwash/socialization is impossible to avoid. Our girl enjoyed a wide variety of colours, toys and subjects until one day, suddenly, it was âPrincess!Princess! Princess!â everything. We were completely stumped since we donât have TV and had never bought âprincessâ branded stuff. Then we figured it out: She had been babysat at a friendâs house a couple of times⌠with 3 slightly older girls. That did it.
Fortunately, she mostly got over it after a couple of months. While we had to add some princessy stuff among the rest, her own tastes and idiosyncrasies are shining through again. This is really all we care about: We donât think she should hate stereotypically girly/princessy stuff, but we donât wish for her to completely limit her own range of tastes because of outside influences.
Between not wanting to buy into the pink/sparkly/princess stuff and the branded/merchandising stuff, yeah, itâs very hard to shop. We buy a lot of our daughterâs clothes at second-hand places, not because itâs cheaper (though it is) but because itâs easier to weed out the crap, possibly because the stock in the store doesnât represent only one seasonâs worth of what industry wants to sell us?
I donât think the two categories Iâve named are separable, actually. Itâs all part of the 7x24 marketing crosshairs that are the birthright of every kid. The sooner they can train the kids to accept their designated roles, the easier itâll be to sell them movies/clothes/merch/patent nostrums. For me, the biggest gag-reflex trigger is (the oft-lionized in these pages) Disney and their bletcherous princesses, but itâs all bad.
Hmm ⌠I always thought about jeans as a very comfortable clothing item. Maybe I ought to try on some leggings sometime.
Why should this be limited to childrenâs clothes? Adults should shop for clothes the same way.
Do you not?
Adult clothes, at least in department stores, are segmented by gender and manufacturer. So thereâs no way to look at, say, all their t-shirts: you are limited to just the t-shirts manufactured for a given gender by a given manufacturer. Thereâs no way to easily peruse all the âcasualâ clothing without going around to every department and hunting them down individually.
Love this idea! Weâve been doing the same thing for our 2.5 year old. She loves science, robots, rockets, monsters, pirates - things typically in the boys section. She even chose monster themed underwear for her first set. But she also loves pink and purple. So getting the boyish themes in her favorite colors has been a challenge.
On the flip side, boys will feel freer to pick things typically girly. She has boy friends who love pink and another that wears his sisterâs dresses to the park. No one judges around here. Well if they do, they donât comment.
Well, most adult men and women really are shaped differently enough to affect the fit of many garments. Prepubescent kids, not so much.
Neiman Marcus does something like this on their website. They have womenâs clothes divided by department, but also grouped into âLifeStylesâ
Although this might involve a fair amount of restructuring for a physical store, on a website it would be relatively easy to provide alternate navigation.
Seems like also things like the Pajamas, boots, etc., that are more unisex anyway could go ahead and be combined. The clothing sizes are an issue.
