Punkin’ Pie is in her first recital tonight. She’s a member of both her elementary school chorus and band, and both will be performing a medley of holiday-themed pieces at 7:00 this evening.
The inspiration for this post isn’t so much the recital - I’m sure that will be blog fodder for tomorrow. No, today’s post is a rant about how difficult it was for me to come up with the outfit that the band teacher requested the students have for the night of the show.
Punkin’ came home with a notice, about two weeks ago, that asked that parents dress their children in “white shirts or blouses, black pants or skirts, black socks or stockings and black shoes.” Since that seemed like a perfectly reasonable thing to ask, and (silly me) perfectly simple things to procure, I didn’t rush right out to buy those the clothes. I figured, “bah! Plain white shirt, plain black skirt, black tights. She’s already got the shoes. Nothing to it! How hard can it be?”
Do you have any appreciation for how very wrong I was?!
I spent the better part of Tuesday morning dragging Organic Mama through the mall - and off to more than a few satellite stores in the neighborhood of the mall - looking for appropriate clothing in which to dress my nine year old. Let me say that again - she’s NINE. Do you think that I could find a plain, black skirt in her size? Well, do you?!
The fact of the matter is that I did, but it took me FOUR stores to find it.
There was nothing resembling what I needed at the Children’s Place; all their blouses were cream colored and they had no black skirts of any variety.
Sears had no blouses, and the one black skirt they did have was a velvet mini with a rhinestone belt. HELLO!? A velvet miniskirt, with a rhinestone belt, in sizes 4 to 6x. FOUR to SIX-EX! Those are little girl sizes, People, but those were NOT little girl skirts!
Our next stop, to Wal-Mart (I know, I know. Shut up. I was getting desperate), brought me even closer to the edge of outrage. Wal-Mart is carrying a clothing line by Mary-Kate and Ashley, and I’m here to tell you that they’re pushing the limits of propriety in their styling of little girl clothes. I found no plain, button-front blouses, though there was a pullover top with a little half sweater that I could have lived with, had it come down to that. Again, though, with the skirts: they had black skirts overlaid with “come and get me” red lace; they had black skirts overlaid with black lace and done with a handkerchief hemline; they had black miniskirts (though without the rhinestones, at least). Each and every one of them entirely inappropriate for anyone under the age of, say, 18. If one is going to attract the kind of attention one is going to get wearing such things, one should be mature enough to handle it. NO ONE in the age range these sizes cover is even remotely mature enough to handle that kind of attention. Hell, I’m not even sure I’m mature enough to handle that kind of attention….
Our last stop was at Kohl’s. I had just about given up at this point and was formulating an emergency plan that involved Land’s End and overnight shipping, when Mama emerged from the maze of racks with a lovely, plain white, button-front blouse. DING! We have a winner for at least half the uniform!
After much pawing about in the girls’ section and coming up with yet more examples of inappropriate skirts, I spotted an employee and asked her for help. It took her a minute to recover from my request (I was quite frazzled by then and took a little bit of my frustration out on her in how I phrased my question. I think it went something like “do you have any plain black skirts for little girls? Anything that won’t make my nine year old look like a cabaret dancer?!”), then she got a concerned look on her face. No, she said, she wasn’t sure they had anything like that; but if they did, they would be over here.
Lo and behold! I found two possible candidates for the skirt. I offered up the choice to Mama, given that I was pushed a tad beyond the point of being able to make reasonable decisions by then and didn’t trust my own judgment.
I’m amazed, and more than a little horrified, by the implications of my clothes shopping experience. We, as a society, are making a lot of noise about how fast children grow up nowadays. We’re collectively bemoaning the state of morals and values in our communities. Now, I’m not saying that the answer to these problems is to dress our kids in plain brown homespun, but I’m certain that the answer doesn’t lie in size 6x black velvet miniskirts with rhinestone belts.
Have you read the entry I linked to that Flea wrote? Addresses just such a problem. I figured it was culture shock for her since she has boys, thought you’d have already encountered this particular circle of hell. The outfit you chose looks nice, though, thank goodness.
It gets even harder as they get older to find clothes that don’t make them look like they are tartlets.
Your new site is really slow for me. I wonder why.
I don’t know why the site may be slow for you - it seems to be working fine from here.
Let me know if you’re still having problems with it in a couple of days and I’ll root around to see if I can find some tech support to figure out what’s going on…
Looks like you’ll need to brush up on the sewing skills! Could be a whole market out there in designing children’s clothes that are both trendy but not slutty. I have no small children but appreciate the difficulty/problem.
Sing it, Sister! Shopping for (will be tomorrow) 5 year old never ceases to send me into a complete rampage. Some of her clothes are more risky than I wore when I worked at a bar in college!
I wish it were unbelievable that these rational outfits are hard to find. I was in KMart last week and I swear they could have called their little girls’ section Tarlets 7 - 14. NOTHING was appropriate. Why is that little girls are not allowed, nay encouraged to emulate the skanky styles of singers/starlets of dubious celebrity? Wait! With Brainless Britney recently flashing her shaved bare nether-regions at paparazzi, what next? I feel a rant coming on, so I am going to stop and go hug my little girls.
I remember being edited in the mornings regarding my attire for school. Sometimes the observation was “too short”. I soon learned that,after getting to school, if I spent just a little time, I could roll up the waistband of my skirt, and be more fashionable.The desire to fit in was strong. I only ran into trouble if I forgot to “unroll” before getting home! This all happened in the early 60s. It’s interesting to hear how some things never change!