Cycles of Fashion

Fashion, like so many other things, goes through cycles. Along with specific items of clothing, attitudes toward fashion emerge cyclically. Dressing for status, for sex appeal, or to show that you don't care how you dress are all attitudes that align with more general social trends.  Much like sporting hole-filled jeans or a whale-bone corset, how we dress our children is a major indicator of how we feel about ourselves and the world around us.

These were the impulses driving Andrea Frost when she created her Babywit clothing line. Frost markets, in her own words, "baby t-shirts with an adult sensibility." Her mini t-shirts and onesies sport left-wing political slogans ("Viva Che", for example, with a stencil of the famous revolutionary) and retro band logos. One particularly adorable onesie is striped black and white like a prison uniform, and features the words "Johnny Cash - Folsom Prison." They are undeniably charming, but  inevitably lead to questions about the thinking behind them. Babies have no interest in rock bands or American politics, and their parents don't want them to. Rather, hip young parents want to express their own hipness and political affiliations through their children. The company even sells parent-child sets or matching t-shirts, if the message wasn't obvious enough.

Where would such a strange idea - children wearing miniature versions of their parents favourite t-shirts - have come from? A quick look through the history of children's fashion reveals that this is far from being a new phenomenon.

Once upon a time (roughly five hundred years ago, to be a little more precise) children were viewed in a very similar way. In Elizabethan England, children represented not only status symbols, but bartering tools. Strong political bonds were forged through marriage, and, as such, children were pawns to be moved about at will (extraordinarily well-dressed pawns!). Because they were meant as demonstrations of the wealth and power of their families, children were dressed as miniature adults, as laden down with corsets and petticoats, doublets and breeches as their adult counterparts.

Over two hundred years later, a glance at a family portrait of the Empress of Austria, Maria Theresa's, impressive brood will demonstrate that the perceived function of children had not changed noticeably. She and all her sisters are identically arrayed in their tiny powdered wigs, their massive skirts and tight corsets artificially lending them the figures of adults.

The Hapsburg girls were the ultimate example of political pawns in their wily mother's hands. Marie Antoinette was most famously married off to the young Dauphin of France (the future and ill-fated Louis XVI), her sister Caroline was married to Ferdinand, King of Naples, and Amelia wed the Duke of Parma. Through carefully planned marriages, Maria Theresa managed to keep her family connected to practically every ruling family in Europe.

The elaborate adult dress of these young royals was not entirely for show, however. A royal allegiance meant nothing if it wasn't backed up with new generations properly binding the two families together. Both girls and boys were often obliged to become sexually active the moment they hit puberty.  Their sexuality, as displayed in their dress, was yet another tool.

Like so many other unquestioned aspects of our culture, much of our current concept of childhood emerged from the Victorian period. A wealthy middle class had been emerging steadily since the early 1700s, resulting in families neither caught in a web of complex aristocratic power struggles nor doomed, by poverty and hardship, to lose most of their infants in the first few years and to set the others to work as soon as they were strong enough. More children were surviving, and those children no longer had an obvious function, to work or to marry well. Indeed, the idea of children having a function at all became increasingly strange. With the Victorians emerged the idea of specialized children's clothing: no longer formal and restricting, but durable and meant to be played in - with the notable exception of their Sunday best.

Current trends suggest, however, that the last hundred years or so have been the exception to the rule, and that our manner of dressing our children is going to keep coming full circle. While we aren't sending 12-year-old girls off to arranged marriages in skirts wider than they are tall, little girls are every bit as sexualized by wearing their mommy's clothes today as they were back then. Even seemingly innocuous styles - Pink Floyd t-shirts and Obama onesies - pose their own dangers. Once again the lines between children and adults are being blurred. Kids, as status symbols and reflections of their parents' place in the world, are somehow less allowed to be children.

Or maybe I'm just being old-fashioned.

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