Monday, August 16, 2010

What Are They Thinking: Girls Fashion Today

We ran into The City today for my 6-week post-baby check. And it's official, I am now cleared for toddler lifting. I will confess I've been picking Sadie up for about a week, very, very carefully. We made a stop at Target for wipes, and a stop at Costco to pick up Maggie's thank you letters before heading home and one thought at Target kept going through my mind (after walking past the girl's clothing section to get to the baby section): "What are they thinking?"

I'll be the first one to admit that my fashion sense doesn't mesh well with the current trends, so "what are they thinking?" isn't an altogether uncommon thought. And at least I haven't seen an eight year old wearing a shirt that says "porn star" in years (that was at the mall when I was in college and was pretty shocking).

The outfits that I saw today weren't quite in the same category as those shirts, but it also made me a little sad that they seemed to be the only option for little girls who are only a little bit bigger than Sadie is (we're buying her 4Ts and these were 5s and up).

What happened to dresses for little girls looking like dresses that are meant for little girls? They don't have to be quite as frilly as the dress on the left (which is from Chasing Fireflies, a catalog that I wistfully page through every time that it comes). I remember lots of plaid and floral when I was little (once a year we went to Sacramento and shopped for dresses at the Gap there). Why does the entire girls section of Target look like a window display for Hot Topic?

At least the baby section still has monkeys and kitties and flowers on the onsies.

Sewing skills just seem to become more and more necessary all the time...

3 comments:

  1. When my girls were younger I used to buy most of their clothes from Gymboree. Now I pretty much stick to Children's Place, Gap and Old Navy. I have to wade through lots of pieces that would never work for my girls and pick out the clothes that look like they belong on children. It's shocking how some of the clothes out there look like they're for kids who are ready to go out to a club for an evening of partying.

    Finding modest dresses that are Mass appropriate is another challenge I have. Usually we wind up buying sleeveless dresses and laying a short sleeved cardigan over them so they meet my standards for church.

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  2. I completely agree with you that the fashions for today's little girls are not something desirable. I want my children to look like children, not small versions of adults. I found this website: http://www.theplaydress.com/ I'm very tempted to buy a dress and tear it apart to make my own patterns. Being very inexpensive I could probably duplicate it easily. Good luck with the sewing.

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  3. For years, I made almost everything my daughter wore, with the exception of shoes, socks and panties. I made her dresses, jumpers, aprons and slips. I found a modest, simple dress pattern and made variations of it in different sizes. Then I made pellon pattern pieces for the bodices, sleeves and pockets and stored them by size in zip lock bags to use over and over. For the skirts I doubled the bodice width and could often get a skirt out of a single length for the smaller sizes. I also made the pattern into jumpers with a couple of alterations. This worked out very well for many years for my daughter and other little girls I sewed for. It was hard back then to find modest clothing and harder now. I also made matching dresses for the American Girl type dolls. Let me know if I can help you with sewing for the girls.

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