The news in brief:
My friend Kate runs
a style blog -
http://champagnestyleshandybudget.wordpress.com/
and you should probably read it if you are into clothes and feeling good about
yourself no matter what your make and model – something which
The news in brief approves of mightily
(The media’s narrow definition of beauty can suck it.)
I wrote this for her
today as a submission. Weather she uses it or not is entirely up to her. Regurgitating
the news like a sarcastic bell-end is my comfort zone, but it’s nice to stretch
your journalistic muscles every once in a while:
Baby clothes are
expensive; really, really, really expensive. Department stores like
Debenhams, Fenwick’s and John Lewis do
the best quality merchandise, but I begrudge paying £20.00 for a shirt that’s
going to get worn once, maybe twice, dribbled on, pooped on and then thrown
away. I don’t care how nice it is. When there’s an endless parade of baby
wipes, nappies and pureed fruit pouches to buy that’s £20.00 of hard earned
cash that doesn’t need to be spent.
The means you need
to start looking in the Supermarkets. Sure, there’s an argument to be made
about the lesser-quality of these mass-produced, synthetic-fibered sweat-shop
produced tat, but babies aren’t as judgemental as us adults and they just want
to be warm, safe and comfortable and Morrison’s Nutmeg and Asda George do all
of the above.
The issue we found
with the Supermarkets when we first started looking for clothes was that they
only seem to produce baby clothes in three colours: pink, blue and a
sort-of-oatmeal brown, which reminds me of the reassuringly-inoffensive neutral
carpets in every flat I’ve ever rented.
I’ve never really
looked into it deeply enough to say with any confidence who is the chicken and
who is the egg in this particular example of gender dimorphism – do the
supermarkets only stock pinks and blues because that’s what the people want, or
do people only want pinks and blues because that’s what the supermarkets are
selling? Either way, the baby clothes isle in your average supermarket megastore
is living in a time vortex where it’s still the 1950’s.
Remember, all little
girls wear nothing but pink and like kittens and ponies and rainbows and
unicorns and all boys wear blue and like dinosaurs, robots, monsters and
rockets.
Yawn.
When we first
learned that we were having a baby, my wife and I ‘agreed’ that it was a ‘good
idea’ to not find out if the little bundle of joy in her tummy was a boy or a
girl. It was a romantic notion, granted, but it wasn’t hugely practical when it
came to buying clothes.
Pink was out –
because imagine the self righteous outrage from the yogurt-knitting brigade if
we dressed a little boy in pink.
Oatmeal was out – we
didn’t want our little munchkin to be dressed from head-to-toe, day-in and
day-out in bland. Also we know a lot of people who rent flats and we didn’t
want to put him down on their carpet and not be able to find him or her.
This left the boys
clothes; rockets, dinosaurs, monsters, aliens and robots are all cool and
totally suitable for a boy or a girl, so we stocked up on a veritable
smorgasbord board of tops intended for a little boy. There was a lot of blues,
but with a little digging we found reds, greens and oranges traditionally
denied to little girls.
The plan was that we
bought an assortment of awesome tops and as soon as the little pipsqueak showed
their face, we would send a friend to Primark to buy a handful of jeans or
skirts to go with them.
He turned out to be
a little boy in the end, but either way there would have been a wardrobe full
of rockets, dinosaurs, monsters, aliens and robots…
