Children, Clothes, and Nudism

The New York Times has a provocative article here (subscription required) on the fashion industry and how it is targeting the 4 to 9 year-old market. Yes, just like toys and cereal, children are now asking for Seven jeans, leggings and pedicures.

“In general, the awareness of fashion is getting younger and younger,” said Pilar Guzman, the editor of Cookie, a magazine aimed at the parents of children under 12. “Just as we’ve seen in the teen market, the interest in clothes is fashion- and celebrity-driven, and that interest has been trickling down.”

And the clothing companies are all falling over each other in the race to compete.

While that news may be welcome to some in the clothing industry, the notion of children dressing and preening like sawed-off adults can be dispiriting. “You get this idea that there is a kind of lost innocence,” Ms. Guzman of Cookie said. “It’s not so much that there is now a little-girl’s version of adult clothes as that the gap is diminishing between what’s meant for children and what’s intended for their elders. I find that a little sad.”

With the JonBenet Ramsey murder case back in the news, and the endless television images of her dressed in high heels and wearing lipstick at child pageants, this new trend can be alarming.

Juliet B. Schor, the author of “Born to Buy: The Commercialized Child and the New Consumer Culture” (Scribner), ascribes children’s heightened acquisitiveness partly to increasingly aggressive marketing. “The very insidious thing about this,” she said, “is that kids get the message that they need this product — whether it’s a sugared cereal or the latest fashion trend — to be O.K., to be cool. That is potentially interfering with their intrinsic sense of self. Kids from the very beginning are learning that your self-worth depends on what you have and how the market evaluates you.”

Which brings us to the opposite of clothing - nudity. Children are natural nudists, they have yet to adopt the self-inflicted shames of society. In the "205 Arguments and Observations in Support of Naturism" document, it is noted that children who grow up in healthy nudist environments "feel better about their bodies, and more comfortable with their sexuality". While nudism de-mystifies and de-sexualizes the human body, the fashion industry is attempting to turn innocent children into sexually-charged versions of mature adults, thus introducing them into a form of pornography at a very young age.