Personal Essay: The Grit and the Glamour
Why do we wear yoga pants while our daughters wear tutus?
by Erin Blakeley
July 9, 2009
I get to class and take my seat beside the other girls, and as usual, they are better dressed than I am. One wears stovepipe jeans and a shrunken black T-shirt; another wears a short denim mini and razor-flat, arch-destroying sandals. A third wears a stunning
print dress. I sigh and wish I had taken the time to find matching socks. I'm used to being less than fashionable, but in the past, the well-dressed women I knew were, well, women. Now the girls with the killer clothes are the toddlers in my son's music class.
But while their diva daughters are dressed to the nines, the moms of these girls are downright dowdy. Yoga pants. Ragged pony tails. Hoodies as far as the eye can see. And it begs the question: why are we dressing our girls — who will spend the day running
and jumping and splashing through puddles — for a night on the town, and ourselves for, well, a day at the playground?
For starters, it seems we've come a long way since Osh Kosh. The children's apparel industry has exploded in the last twenty years, offering more choices and styles than ever before. But more significantly, it has matured — at least when it comes to girl
clothes. Dressing like mommy used to require either a Little House on the Prairie aesthetic (Laura Ashley), or a country club membership (Polo Ralph Lauren). But these days, you can find True Religion jeans, J.Crew cashmere and Uggs in itty-bitty toddler sizes,
to say nothing of seventies rock band-themed T-shirts, matchstick cords or string bikinis. So dressing like mom has never been more possible. Or rather, like mom would dress — if she wasn't wearing sweatpants.
While kids' fashion has matured, adult styles have regressed.Speaking of sweatpants: while kids' fashion has matured, adult styles have regressed, as schlubby adult clothing has moved out of our closets and into the realm of socially acceptable streetwear. Blue jeans and T-shirts have become allowable in all but the
most conservative of workplaces. Flip-flops and sneakers have migrated over from functional accessories to fashionable ones. And when was the last time you (or anyone you know) wore a pair of pantyhose?
As the mother of a son, I used to notice the frumpy mom/diva daughter display from the bemused vantage point of an outsider. After all, I had a boy. Dressing him was utterly meaningless. Everything he owned was a primary color, and featured a dog, a soccer
ball or a dinosaur. There was no fashion divide between us. Side-by-side, in our sensible knits, we matched.
But when my daughter was born last winter, I was flummoxed. What would she wear? I'm not the girliest-girl on the block; I don't like pink, I didn't play with dolls as a kid and I've never even read
Little Women. The simplest task of parenting — putting her in clothing — was somehow complicated. If I dressed her like a diva, I was undoubtedly giving in to someone else's idea of girlness. But if I swore off pink, and simply recycled all of her
brother's baby clothes, wasn't I pushing her into mine?
Most women opt for pink — and how. Hot pink bundler, pale pink blanket, pink and brown diaper bag, all surrounding the tiny pink face in the stroller. But as I began to realize as I searched for clothing for my daughter, the alternatives are just as narrow.
Rocker denim, smart-mouthed t-shirts and black leggings seem to exist primarily to ward off the siren-like seductions of the Disney Princesses. But pink or punk, the message is the same: I am dressing you like the girl I want you to be.
Or maybe, like the girl I still want to be, but have given up on. Perhaps that is why so many of us are so dowdy; we've given our daughters the hard work of becoming the girls we still wish we could be. We dress them like dolls, laugh when they learn the
difference between Coach and Chanel, post videos of them rocking out to Patti Smith on our Facebook profile. They become our tiny billboards, plastered with our projections of beauty or coolness or disaffection. Meanwhile, we knock around town in our pajamas.
It's the ultimate opt-out.
©2009 Erin K. Blakeley and Babble Media
About the Author
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Erin Blakeley is a freelance writer and journalist whose work has appeared in the Star Ledger, NYC24, and Tiempo, among other publications. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with her husband and son.
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