A few weeks before to protesters taking over the LVMH offices in Paris, one of the company’s most well-known luxury brands, Louis Vuitton, unveiled its first-ever baby collection for infants aged 0 to 12 months. The fact that some people are fighting for pensions while others are ready to spend that much money on an outfit that will be peed on tells volumes about the current climate. It would be impossible to link the £755 grey cashmere onesie or the £360 personalized Mary Jane sneakers to any political unrest.
It is not only Louis Vuitton. Some people may always associate children’s clothing with cheap T-shirts that you don’t mind getting yoghurt all over them, yet the market for children’s clothing is predicted to generate US$267.50 billion (£215.30 billion) in revenue by 2023 and is expected to grow by 2.46% annually.
In 2021, for example, hyper-aspirational brand The Row, run by the Olsen twins, where prices for a jumper are regularly in four figures, launched its first children’s collection (two to eight year olds), abandoning their unwavering palette of the animals and ecru for bright blue, orange, and pink cashmere items that could be yours for as little as $800 (£646) (or £646). Whistles debuted a line of children’s clothing on the British high street last year, following adult clothing companies & Other Stories, Reformation, and Rejina Pyo in making a similar step.
Thanks to a plethora of brands that target the stylish youngster (or, more likely, the parent outfitting them), playgrounds are crowded with kids wearing intimidatingly fashionable outfits. These include British companies like Organic Zoo, Another Fox, and The Bonnie Mob. However, many of them are imports, including the Spanish labels The Animals Observatory, Tiny Cottons, and Bobo Choses. Unsurprisingly, Scandinavia is setting the standard for fashionable children’s clothing, from the kid-friendly yet extremely “cool” patterns of Mini Rodini to outerwear labels like Polarn O. Pyret, which are equally at home on a North Sea trawler as they are on a see-saw.
If clothing kids in fashionable attire seems very today, it is yet it isn’t. As to dress historian Alden O’Brien, youngsters started wearing adult clothing in the early eighteenth century. However, “the age for moving out of children’s dresses rose as attitudes toward youth changed – letting kids be children, play, and have less constricting clothes.”
Allowing children to be children certainly converts sartorially to Teletubby-brights and busy prints that make it difficult to identify the morning’s banana in the modern mind. However, there is also a fresh neutral mood, known as the “sad beige” style, which makes toddlers in UK parks appear as though they just left rural Hälsingland or the 19th century. Grandpa collar shirts and pinafores are available in dark beige, a kid-favorite color, as well as colors of clay, oat, sesame, and sesame.”This has been heavily influenced by the web because it looks nice in pictures,” claims Phyllida Gray, founder of Les Petits Champignons, a store that specializes in pre-loved children’s clothing. She has observed this trend reflected in her sales.
Currently on vacation, the mother’s kids’ wardrobe “is split evenly between cool vintage stuff that’s bold, colorful and playful and then neutral-colored things that are easy to couple, and will look great in a photo against an attractive French door.”
Although it might not be ideal for a life where everything revolves round your Hotpoint, it can be a real winner in terms of utility. Gray asserts that dressing children in neutrals can be simple because you don’t have to worry as much about everything matching. Once more, it is historical precedence. White cotton was favored for baby clothes in the 19th century because it could be easily bleached without fading, says costume and textile expert Colleen Callahan.
However, this subdued style, in John Lewis’ opinion, has a limited shelf life. According to a brand survey, most kids started refusing clothing choices at the age of seven, and with autonomy comes the choice to wear more color, the reasoning goes. Tahini-colored tights, however, might be more popular than they first appear. “Kids often enjoy matching clothes with their parents, so it is normal that similar tones come for adult and kidswear,” explains Terezia Prazska, founder of the company Silly Silas, which produces knitted tights with braces that are modeled after those worn by her parents’ generation in the former Czechoslovakia. What could be a more appropriate partner to a garish pattern than a putty tone? “Muted colors are famous for their practicality and versatility.”
All of these stylish neutrals also gently avoid gendering children’s clothing, which Callahan claims is a relatively recent phenomenon because blue and pink had been utilized interchangeably for boys and girls until after World War II. Perhaps there is also a practical reason for this: it will be simpler to pass down genderless clothing. Additionally, while a pink princess design or blue dinosaur romper can be clearly recognizable as M&S, caramels are more covert wealth than produced in mass quantities high street. Gilets and caps without logos are the equivalent of adult clothing.