Right-on John Lewis is on the wrong track

Assigning gender to children’s clothes does one important thing – it halves a mother’s shopping time

Have you heard about the new John Lewis Christmas advert? Word on the street is that after last year’s bouncing animals, this year’s showstopper will feature a load of yummy mummies throwing tantrums. But not in a fun way. Not at all. Yet another of life’s certainties has been swept away by the rising tide of gender fluidity and John Lewis’s core customers are most definitely drowning, not waving.

The announcement that children’s clothes will no longer be categorised under the repressive, if useful, labels “boys” and “girls” is supposed to strike a blow for the minority. In truth, it has just thoroughly alienated the majority. Why? Partly because it is irksome and inconvenient, and partly because it bespeaks a retail institution that is so intent on pandering to pressure groups that it has lost sight of what its loyal customer base wants.

Apparently some boys want to wear girl clothes and some girls want to wear boy clothes. Lovely. Let them. Last time I looked, there were no bylaws proscribing the purchase of flamingo leggings for boys or Stormtrooper pyjamas for girls. As far as the cultural mood music is concerned, goodness knows anything goes, and quite rightly so.

When BBC Radio 2 presenter Chris Evans’s son recently turned up to a theatre premier of a David Walliams play wearing a dress, nobody turned a hair. Those who did pass comment applauded his panache. Admittedly his idiosyncratic style might not have been greeted with such metropolitan nonchalance were he walking down the street in Woking or Ipswich, and that would be sad and unfortunate.

But it is not John Lewis’s job to socially engineer or even influence public opinion. It is John Lewis’s job to flog us lovely things and not to be knowingly undersold while doing so.

It’s a tiresome trend. The RSPCA has suffered a drop in membership after its calamitous decisions to launch overtly political campaigns that saw it aggressively prosecute pet owners and spend £330,000 on legal action against Heythrop Hunt. And who can forget how the National Trust dropped the word “Easter” from its Easter egg hunt earlier this year for no good reason, apart from overly heightened sensibilities and an embarrassing lack of common sense?

These are charitable organisations that might, at a push, explain (but not excuse) their ham-fisted attempts to win PC brownie points. John Lewis is a business and needs to remember that catering for the many (us boring old binary fuddy-duddies) is not the same as discriminating against the few (intersex, pansexual, third-gender free spirits).

Given the choice, mothers like me would buy most things online, because it is less time-consuming, more convenient and doesn’t involve traipsing. So when we do go shopping it is to answer a more complex psychological need, rather than to find stuff, buy stuff and bring stuff home.

Browsing in a John Lewis store is supposed to be a leisure activity, a pleasure activity; my husband and I once had a date night there and it was glorious. I got to wander and touch and dreamily aspire in home furnishings, while he stroked man toys in electricals.

Taking offspring to the high street to shop for clothes is always far more stressful, because children have no class, bless ’em. Given half a chance, they will invariably choose nasty cartoon motifs in fire-hazard fabrics; which is why we take them to John Lewis, where everything is remorselessly tasteful. There is nothing to offend our Breton-striped adult sensibilities, and while it might cost a bit more, it’s worth it because the retail experience is so easy.

Or was so easy. I have no desire to wade through a politically correct trouser department with an incandescent eight-year-old who can’t believe I’m suggesting she try on yet another pair of boys’ breeches. I feel ennui at the prospect of rootling through twice as many coats and double the number of school shoes. That’s not prejudice – that’s just time-management.

The campaigners who would turn Jonelle into an LGBTQ role model have congratulated the store on its stance because, after all, who needs labels? Apart, that is, from everybody when they are out shopping for clothes. Unless sizing is to be abandoned, too, in order to combat fat-shaming?