Fashion 88 : It’s the Year of Kid Couture
Babies are back in style. Wearing up-to-the-minute clothes and riding state-of-the-art strollers, ‘80s babies now go almost everywhere their parents go.
In fact, so many affluent, thirtysomething parents now put the spotlight on their kids that cartoonists are having a field day spoofing the trendy tots. “It’s the year of the baby,” says Lee Lorenz, New Yorker art editor, referring to the spate of recent baby-related cartoons in the magazine. Humorists are responding to “a kind of competition” once limited to yuppie parents but now extended to their kids, Lorenz says.
Maybe so. But the new spotlight on babies has a heartwarming, spiritual side. It’s parents’ desire to share with their kids the same high quality and style they demand for themselves, many experts say. Even more important, it’s a way for harried, modern couples to incorporate babies into their busy lives in ways their own parents never would have dreamed possible.
Bill Daddi, a spokesman for the textile research firm Cotton Inc., notes the impact of this relatively new breed of parent on the cotton industry: “We began calling on children’s designers just about two years ago. Before that, there wasn’t anything worth paying attention to.”
Things began changing, he explains, when “baby boomers, who always wear natural fibers themselves, started demanding the same things for their children.” The increasing demand for cotton clothing has pushed cotton’s share of the children’s market to 49% for boys’ clothes (a 4-point increase from 1985), and 44% for girls’ (a 5-point increase from 1985).
In addition to high-quality fabric, these parents are looking for clothes that make a fashion statement. As Mary Lisa Gavenas, editor-in-chief of Young Fashions magazine, explains it: “Children’s wear used to be much more practical. Now it is a fashion category. Even OshKosh, which used to focus on the basic blue bib overall, is coming out with designs in black and dark green,” she says.
“Two years ago, you couldn’t sell dark green for an American kid to save your life.” And, she says, “Los Angeles looks are really the only American styles that can compete with those from Europe.”
L.A.-based designer Malina Gerber agrees. When she opened her first store five years ago on Main Street in Santa Monica, she was surprised at how receptive people were to her use of color. “People didn’t expect black and red for babies, and I did it very timidly at first.”
The risk is paying off. Last year she opened a second store, in West Los Angeles. This year she’s franchising, with a New York City shop that opened in March and one in Cedarhurst, Long Island, that will open in August.
The Malina line combines grown-up fabrics, like deep-olive plaid seersucker, with a sophisticated European schoolboy/girl look. She likes to accessorize with fancifully patterned suspenders, bow ties and “Little Rascals” hats. While her look has brought her attention, “function is my main preoccupation,” said Gerber, who thinks scaled-down adult clothes are “horrible. Children have completely different proportions and life styles than we do.”
Finding the perfect fabrics can be difficult. “When the suppliers ask what I need my fabric for, I hate to tell them children’s wear because they show me pink ducks.”
Two-year-old Erin Feldman will probably never have to contend with pink ducks. Her mother, Stacey Feldman, is working with partner Laurie Goldstein to introduce a new fall line called Tot Couture that contains, among other things, a pint-size version of a beaded denim suit by English designer Katharine Hamnett.
Feldman, a graduate of Fashion Institute of Technology in New York, has designed for her father’s L.A. firm, Todd & Co., for nine years. She thought of doing a children’s line when she started shopping for Erin and couldn’t find what she wanted.
The collection, which arrives in stores starting July, includes a black, washed-silk miniature bomber jacket that any mommy would love for herself. Under-jacket options include cotton-Lycra tube skirts, tiny bicycle pants, quilted silk jumpsuits or perhaps a washed denim one with intricate black beading around the collar. Details, such as white silk lining in a cotton warm-up jacket and small metal pulleys on the drawstring-waist sweat pants, give the line a luxurious edge.
Both Malina and Tot Couture sell for fairly grown-up prices. A Malina outfit of pants, shirt, suspenders, bow tie and hat sells for about $78. The Tot Couture black silk bomber is about $116. Both lines are at Fred Segal on Melrose Avenue and in Santa Monica, and in both Malina stores.
The Tot Couture label plays off what Feldman calls the “trendy baby” phenomenon. “Two years ago, if you didn’t have an Aprica stroller, your friends wouldn’t walk with you. I don’t know what’s ‘in’ now. “
At Bellini’s in Beverly Hills, a top source of trendy baby gear, the word is that the hard-to-steer Aprica Sterling ($329.85) has been supplanted by the Inglesina Special ($219.85). Both have reclining seats and are collapsible. But neither will take baby through a marathon.
For that, there are Racing Strollers, Baby Joggers and two-seated Twinners. Invented by former newspaper editor Phil Baechler to enable him to run with his son, Travis, the strollers are aluminum-framed carts fitted with nylon seats and three 20-inch bicycle wheels.
Baechler, 39, stresses that the stroller is designed to help runners maintain perfect jogging form as they push their tots. “I have pictures of people running marathons with them,” he says. The prices, about $250 for a single-seater and $350 for a double, haven’t been a deterrent.
“People see it more as a piece of fitness equipment than as a stroller,” says Baechler. “Many of these people are triathletes who spend thousands on their racing bikes, so they aren’t turned off by the price.”
Stephen Cohen, a 41-year-old L.A. lawyer, bought a Twinner to take his two 10-month-old boys for jogs. “It’s the greatest, but buy the canopy if you want to take them jogging in the sun,” he says.
(Racing Strollers are sold at Aunt Susie’s Baby Grand in Manhattan Beach, all Frontrunners outlets, Kendrick’s for Children in Torrance and by mail order catalogue, (509) 457-0925.)
Parents interested in water sports will respond to baby-size wet suits designed by Randy Meistrell of L.A.’s Body Glove company. Meistrell started making the suits in 1982, when his son, Matt, was in swim school. “I went to pick him up and I noticed he was shivering, so I went home and made him a wet suit,” says Meistrell. “When we went back the next day, 12 mothers ordered them for their kids.”
While they are not lifesavers, the suits do make the children more buoyant. “They give kids confidence in the water,” says Meistrell. “I make them in bright colors, so they are easy to spot. They attract a lot of attention, so you end up with all these people keeping an eye on your kids.”
Meistrell’s sons, Matt and Nick, now 6 and 2 1/2, have their own surfboards too, and their father is teaching them how to surf. The mini wet suits retail for about $60 and are available at Dive ‘n Surf in Redondo Beach, Surf Beat in Santa Monica and E. T. Surfboards in Hermosa Beach.
Whether it’s clothing or equipment, many parents are willing to pay that extra dollar for practicality plus. Sometimes the plus is simply a label. Two Size 6 skirts in a local store, for example, are both of striped blue 100% cotton pre-washed denim. One, by OshKosh b’Gosh, costs $16. The other, by Baby Guess?, is tagged at $33. “I sell the same number of each,” said the salesperson. Why? “The same reason people come into the store: designer labels,” she said.
The Converse label’s latest contribution to hip footwear is a line of dinosaur-decorated sneaks, called Conasaurs. Images of Tyrannosaurus Rex and similar prehistoric friends are carved into the soles, so that tykes can make dinosaur tracks when they walk in mud. Converse spokesmen say the $30 shoes are selling “like hot cakes” at major department stores.
At Fred Segal on Melrose Avenue, which sells everything from tiny fake fur boas to the Children’s Yellow Pages, buyer Missi Singer says she looks for clothes that “stimulate the right side of the brain.”
She has a special salve for people who feel they may have spent too much money on their little ones. It’s an $8 T-shirt that says: “I look just like my Daddy.”
“People feel better about what they’re spending if Dad is wearing the same thing,” Singer says.
