Busting the Piggy Bank

From all appearances, the women nibbling bunny-shaped cookies and chatting about their children could have been gathered at a baby shower. But the table full of hand-knitted cotton sweaters and finely smocked dresses wasn’t displaying newly bestowed gifts. These were samples of an exclusive European baby clothing line, Emma T., and the occasion was an invitation-only trunk show in the courtyard of Jamie Tisch’s Better Things boutique in West Hollywood. In between their appointments with personal trainers, manicurists and decorators, the designer-labeled mothers with nary a sign of fatigue, fat or frizzies scooped up the $50 sweaters and $75 dresses.

“You don’t feel guilty shopping for your kids,” said Tisch, wife of film producer Steve Tisch who sponsored the trunk show and was buying for their three toddlers. The A-list Hollywood insider and the other mother shoppers are like many parents who’ve had it with blah basics and can afford today’s haute tot couture.Whether they buy a $450 itty-bitty Burberry trench coat, an $85 Banana Republic cashmere cardigan or a $2,000 hand-painted Silver Cross pram, today’s pampering parents are going positively buggy for babies and kids.

For the money, they earn bragging rights and a stylish sophistication that’s light-years beyond the classic Buster Brown and Carter’s that have stocked kids’ closets for generations. Cash registers are ringing as shoppers respond to slicker styles that feature superior workmanship and fabrics, a combination that has kept children’s apparel immune from the ills plaguing every other segment of the luxury apparel business.

Cool baby booty is leading shoppers back into stores, where sales of infant and toddler wear increased 5.7% last year, making it the only apparel category that posted an increase. Shoppers are attracted to an improved variety of clothes for older children, too, as the very idea of indulgent dressing has changed.

Luxury used to mean some sort of impractical finery that sentenced little girls to suffer in stiff skirts and boys to struggle in suspender pants. Now the good stuff is an airy $60 linen shirt, a comfy $50 designer T-shirt or a one-of-a-kind playsuit that weathers mud and lots of laundering.

Trunk show shopper and interior designer Elizabeth Dinkel frequents upscale Neiman Marcus and French boutiques Bonpoint and Tartine et Chocolat for her two children because the clothing “teaches them an appreciation for beautiful things.” The Beverly Hills mother, wearing pearls and a Gucci bag, adds, “I appreciate finer things. Therefore, I want my children to have them too.”

A well-dressed child may not guarantee a future art aficionado, but the dashing tykes have symbolic value for their parents, said Angela Johnson, editor of Youth Markets Alert, a New York trade publication. Luxurious children’s wear is “a way of displaying your success,” she said. “In some circles, dressing a kid in more special clothes is a way of showing, ‘I have a kid and a career, and I manage all of this.’”

Not every mother of means considers the trend healthy. Actress and writer Heather Thomas tries not to indulge her 22-month-old daughter with clothes above $100. “I think it’s an obsession,” she said, while scanning the Emma T. sweaters. “I think human beings have switched their perfectionism to their children, having failed to meet the standards themselves.”

Setting the pace is “the spoiled generation,” the baby boomers, who are the most affluent and influential of all consumer groups, said Marshal Cohen, president of NPD Fashionworld, a Port Washington, N.Y., market research firm: “We are bestowing our standards on our kids.” And as boomers become grandparents with each turn of the calendar, they’re generously giving gifts, which constitute nearly 40% of children’s apparel purchases.

Not so long ago, pricey and precious baby gifts were affectionately known as “grandma bait,” said Linda Jeffcott, president of Haute Baby, which has luxury boutiques in Beverly Hills, Dallas and Houston. “This is a family thing now. Aunts, uncles, cousins, best friends, husbands--they all want to be in on it now,” she said. Her boutiques attract celebrities such as Jodie Foster and Geena Davis, who can easily afford her most expensive items, such as $100 jean jackets or $750 bedding ensembles. But these aren’t her only clients.

“People of all incomes want something special. Even if they are on a hamburger income, they are still going to put the baby first. That is not part of the ‘me’ era that we saw for the last 10 years,” said the 23-year veteran of the children’s apparel industry.

Even in these uncertain times, kids are coming first, said NPD’s Cohen. “People are thinking differently today than they were a year ago,” he said, noting how the terrorist attacks strengthened the country’s growing pro-family sentiment. The material expressions of our changed priorities are still easy to see.

“The status symbol of the ‘80s was a car. Of the ‘90s, it was the home. The status symbol of the 2000s is the family,” said Cohen. “That includes where you take your family on vacation and buying the luxury SUV instead of the sports car.”

Today’s parents are opting to show their love the old-fashioned way by including children in more activities, including formerly off-limits resort vacations, restaurant meals and Saturday night shopping. Parents of these more visible children have been demanding more sophistication ever since they were expecting, said Laurie McCartney, chief executive officer of Estyle.com, an online retailer of baby and maternity gear.

“Just because you are pregnant doesn’t mean you lose your sense of style,” she said, “and that translates to your children.”

McCartney, a mother of two, shares the same disappointment in mainstream fare as her customers. “You go to the top four or five retailers, and all their stuff looks the same,” she said. “After a while, people are looking for something different.”

The hard work of parenting hasn’t changed, but today it’s been made to seem glamorous. Pregnant women are encouraged to show off, not hide, their rounded bellies in trendy crop tops and stretchy slip dresses. Magazines from Ebony to People present banner news of celebrity newborns, famous stay-at-home moms and elegant nurseries that set the gotta-have-it standard.

With parents of lesser means happily financing finery, children never need to leave the lap of luxury. They can lounge on a $769 custom easy chair from www.babystyle.com or on cozy if less costly furniture from the Pottery Barn Kids or new Bombay Kids stores and catalogs.

Whether it’s furniture or fashion, many of the same vendors offer children’s versions of adult products.

Kids’ clothes used to have so little cachet that adult clothing companies gladly ignored the market. Then a wave of established grown-up designers and businesswomen became parents, and bingo! Babies are hip.

Motherhood motivated Jackie Robbins, co-founder of www.flip floptrunkshow.com, to begin stocking children’s sizes of the site’s adult sandals and flip-flops. Young mother Pamela Skaist-Levy, co-founder of Juicy Couture, simply shrank their mommy-sized sweats for Juicy Baby, their new toddler collection. This spring, Tarina Tarantino delivered a daughter and Bambino, a diminutive version of her jewelry and hair accessories collection.

Cool kid clothes don’t always come with triple-digit price tags. “At all ends of the market, from the high to the low, people can buy much more fashionable clothing for their children,” said Michele Silver, editor in chief of Earnshaw’s, a trade publication for the children’s wear industry.

Even mid-priced major manufacturers are trying to keep up by offering a handful of slightly more expensive and stylish items, Silver said.

Some parents may be willing to indulge in top-priced designer children’s fashion because a Baby Dior jeans and jacket can cost $200 or $300 apiece, a bargain compared with the nearly identical adult version, which typically costs nearly 10 times more.

Retailers at all price levels have discovered sales relief in children’s wear. At the besieged Gap, the company’s Baby Gap and Kids Gap divisions have consistently outperformed the adult brands, particularly in the aftermath of September’s terrorist attacks. Though even big league players such as JCPenney are luring customers with new and improved children’s departments, the most interesting children’s clothing is coming from nimble niche players who dare to tweak the conventions of kid clothing.

L.A.’s Anamyn Allen reconstructs adult-sized vintage clothing into $28 rock concert T-shirts and $30 collegiate sweatpants for her Claude children’s collection. Pasadena designer Ava Walsh has found a national following for her mid-priced Spunky Punk line, which offers leopard, camouflage and pony prints in trendy silhouettes.

Perhaps the most unusual approach comes from Australian baby photographer Anne Geddes, who is famous for her portraits of children as flowers and bugs. She recently started selling $10 to $60 infant wear on her www.anneged des.com Web site.

Though most of the clothes are classic children’s wear, her bunny-ear cardigans and bunny-tail sleepers turn infants into tiny rabbits that beg for a photo. As a photographer, she imagined snapshots of the adorable outfits and how her designs could aid a photo shoot. For example, her oversized baby blankets are flannel because it minimizes marks on tender infant skin.

Cute, after all, doesn’t always guarantee comfort. The best designers also anticipate parents’ reactions to the clothes. That’s something Walsh has learned as she miniaturizes trendy adult clothes for Spunky Punk.

“It still has to be innocent,” she said. “You don’t want your baby to look like Britney Spears.”