More Than Just a Fad

Modern American children and teens have long been subject to clothes fads, from blue jeans and leather jackets to poodle skirts to bell bottoms to platform shoes to black everything and now back again to more leather jackets and designer jeans. The peer-pressure method of selecting clothes was taken in stride as a cyclic boom for the fashion business and a bane to parents’ pocketbooks.

But in recent years many children’s interest in clothing and its price tag seem to have crossed the line to obsession. Educators report numerous examples of taunting, school fights and even murder over who was wearing what. More is going on here than simply a desire to be well-dressed.

There seems to be a hunger not just for acceptance but for superiority; a need less to fit in than to put down. Media advertising, especially television, certainly fuels such feelings: Advertising at its best, says one executive, makes “people feel that without their product, you’re a loser. Kids are very sensitive to that.”

But blaming advertising is too facile. If Daddy and Mommy make a fuss over their designer possessions, why is it surprising that the child take the message a logical step further, by judging people to be either designer or “non-name brand”?

Some parents are fighting back by placing their children in public and private schools where all children wear uniforms. One Baltimore elementary school student says the uniforms are better because now “people don’t laugh at me.”

That child’s relief that he is no longer judged by his clothes has a much broader implication; it calls for an examination of why the appearance of riches has become more important than wealth of character to so many. It is an important question that won’t be answered in advertising sound bites or on labels on the backsides of jeans.