Casual does not have to mean scruffy
This week, Vogue posted a story online entitled “Have We Reached Peak Crop Top?”. Well, I’m not sure how the rest of the nation feels, but we certainly have in my house. Since my daughter broke up for the summer holidays and has been released from the not-very-heavy constraints of her striped blue cotton summer uniform dress, all she has wanted to wear is a luminous pink and black Lycra cropped vest my mother bought for her earlier this year (thanks, Mum) and the patterned Gap sportswear leggings she was given for Christmas.
I wish this was inspired by the World Athletics Championships because if I thought she was channelling the work ethic or the physical condition of a Katarina Johnson-thompson or Dina Ashersmith, I’d be thrilled. But there doesn’t appear to be much athleticism occurring while she’s clad in this gear. It’s more about posturing about in front of the mirror and “looking cool”.
But as athleisure is the way things have gone in adult fashion of late, it should be no surprise that kids are at it, too.
Marks & Spencer reports that since it launched a “girls’ fashion sports range” in spring 2016 it has become something of a runaway success. As Tara Ryan, the head of childrenswear design, tells it, the demand is coming straight from the kids themselves. “Absolutely, it’s from them because it’s both cool and comfortable. They love wearing jersey as it’s super-comfortable and they can move around easily.”
Which is lovely, of course, but seeing my skinny eight year-old in a crop top just isn’t working for me.
Until now I’ve got off lightly. I know parents have a hard time with offspring who refuse to wear jumpers or will absolutely not negotiate with buttons; girls who’ll only wear pink or never wear pink, boys who refuse to get out of pyjamas or consider shirts. But as long as she’s “cosy” or “not itchy”, my daughter’s not been too fussy and has allowed me to style her in the slightly old-fashioned way I wanted to dress as a child.
Admittedly, I was weird. I wanted to dress like a character from The Secret Garden, The Water Babies, Anne of Green Gables or anything by E. Nesbit, in pie-crust collar blouses, dark velvet pinafores and sticky-out white cotton underskirts. In a parallel life
I was the wealthy orphan from a Victorian children’s novel. I dreamed of taffeta skirts and satin-covered buttons. Modern dressing was neither formal nor complicated enough in my opinion. I was a mother’s dream.
And while I’m now reasonable enough to understand that bloomers and corsetry are not practical garments for the average eight-yearold, I do still hearken to a storybook aesthetic. So do I put my most governessy foot down or let my daughter run wild in skin-tight Lycra?
Celia Muñoz, the half-spanish, half-french founder of kidswear label La Coqueta (worn by Princess Charlotte), who has five children under nine, takes the traditional southern European attitude of “the mother decides”.
“In continental Europe children have less of a say about what they want to wear,” she says. “When I opened my shop [in Hampstead, London] it was a surprise that here the children are the ones who choose. In Spain and France your mummy tells you. I let my kids choose what they want to wear – but they come to my shop!”
Her five children are always dressed in La Coqueta – except for on the family’s Fantastic Fun Fridays when for one night only they are allowed to wear T-shirts and leggings. Her husband likes the formal look, too. “When two of the girls wore tracksuits, he made them go running with him,” she says. “So now they know that if they want to wear sportswear they have to go for a run!”
Eva Karayiannis, mother of three and the founder of Caramel, another stylish children’s brand that is inspired by vintage clothes, has a more relaxed attitude. “I often think about who I’m designing for and the shapes and colours and prints I choose are definitely for the parents rather than the kids,” she admits. She has three children and her youngest, a boy who is almost eight, is refusing to wear anything but his Chelsea football kit.
“I don’t really care – this is the age they start discovering their own style and how they want to express themselves. It’s a kind of pre-teen moment when kids are beginning to pay attention to image. I guess it’s why I sell fewer clothes for the eight to 10-year-olds. They’ve started imposing their own will.” Let battle commence…