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Children's clothing or kids' clothing is clothing for children who have not yet grown to full height. Children's clothing is often more casual than adult clothing, fit for play and rest. In the early 21st century, however, childrenswear became heavily influenced by trends in adult fashion. Grandma bait is a
retail industry Retail is the sale of goods and services to consumers, in contrast to wholesaling, which is sale to business or institutional customers. A retailer purchases goods in large quantities from manufacturers, directly or through a wholesaler, and th ...
term for expensive children's clothing. Due to the rise of social media platforms such as Instagram, celebrities and fashion bloggers have been using their accounts to post pictures of their children wearing luxury "
street style Street fashion is fashion that is considered to have emerged not from studios, but from the grassroots streetwear. Street fashion is generally associated with youth culture, and is most often seen in major urban centers. Magazines and Newspapers ...
" clothing, thus inspiring parents to dress their children as they would dress themselves. Good quality, well-designed garments are a priority for some parents, and children's clothing is getting a prime place in top-label stores and high-end fashion retail outlets. Clothes are also getting separately designed for boys and girls at a very early age.


History

Childhood is distinct from certain parameters in all societies, from infancy to adolescence; societal expectations about children's abilities, limitations, and how they look are present at all stages of their development. In every era, clothing plays an important role in the "look" of childhood. An overview of the history of children's clothing reveals changes.


Early children's clothing

Children, regardless of gender, shared styles and cuts before the twentieth century. From the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries, both men and women wore gowns, tunics, and robes. The gown became a thing for women, newborns, and toddlers only after men's attire evolved into two-piece clothes, shirts, and breeches. Children's styles evolved from gowns to adult garments as they grew older.


Gowns for women and babies

Swaddling was popular for a short period, but ankle-length white frocks and slip skirts for babies and crawling toddlers were popular around the 1500s since women wore ultra-fine muslin and chemise dresses in the 1700s, which looked remarkably similar to the attire worn by young children since the middle of the century. Children's gowns were given additional accessories like waist belts as kid's fashion grew. Another look that gave the ideal example of women's neoclassical fashion was this one. Most women, girls, and toddler boys wore garments made of lightweight fabrics like silk or cotton during the 1800s.


Girls' dresses

While men's clothes changed dramatically as they grew older in the nineteenth century, girls' dresses stayed relatively unchanged. Women's attire did not alter much in terms of cut or stylistic detail, from their birth robes to the skirted outfits they wore their entire lives. The fundamental distinction between children's and women's fashion was that the length of the dress steadily increased, eventually reaching the floor by mid-adolescence.


Function

Function and design must meet at the right proportions in children's clothes for it to be popular and accepted. Fabric choices, openings and fastenings, fit and ease, trimmings used are all major considerations when designing children's wear. Some other factors a designer designing for children's clothing should focus on are the changing shape of the growing kid and different proportions of the different parts of the body. Leisure wear and sports wear are two very prominent design styles in children's clothing.
School uniforms A school uniform is a uniform worn by students primarily for a school or otherwise an educational institution.They are common in primary school, primary and secondary schools in various countries. An example of a uniform would be requiring but ...
are another type of specialized clothes for children.


Sizes

American sizes for baby clothes are usually based on the child's weight. European sizes are usually based on the child's height. These may be expressed as an estimated age of the child, e.g., size 6 months (or 3–6 months) is expected to fit a child in height and in weight.Size chart
from Carter’s and OshKosh B’gosh
Children's clothing is also sometimes worn by adults who are very short.


Children's clothing and gender

Gender-specific clothing for young children was rare throughout most of history, for purely practical reasons. This included both the type of clothing and the color. Before birth, the parents did not know whether the baby would be a boy or girl; white clothes were easier to clean; and less clothing was needed, since all of it could be used for any baby, instead of parents feeling like they should buy or make a full set of pink dresses for one baby and then a full set of blue overalls for the next baby. Before the 1940s, young boys and girls alike wore short dresses. In the US, during the 1940s and 1950s, boys were dressed like their fathers, which meant shirts and trousers and the same colors that their fathers wore. From the mid-1960s through the mid-1980s, the fashion for American girls was unisex clothing, such as jeans and T-shirts. Thus American fashion transitioned from having both boys and girls frequently wear dresses in the 19th century to having neither always wearing dresses by the 1970s. Gender-specific colors emerged in the middle of the 20th century. Clothing was expensive, and white clothes could be bleached when they became dirty. Consequently, colored clothes were not used for babies until the Victorian era, and at that time, any child could be dressed in any color. The
color code A color code is a system for displaying information by using different colors. The earliest examples of color codes in use are for long-distance communication by use of flags, as in semaphore communication. The United Kingdom adopted a color c ...
of using pink primarily for girls' clothes and blue primarily for boys' clothes did not appear until 1940s onwards. In fact, in the first part of the 20th century, light blue clothes were recommended for American girls, as being the more "delicate and dainty" color, and pink was recommended for boys, because it was the "stronger color". Other color-coding schemes recommended that the colors be selected to coordinate with the child's hair or eye color, with blue being recommended for blond hair or blue eyes. Children's clothing in the English-speaking world has become increasingly segregated, with young girls especially being expected to wear pink.
Peggy Orenstein Peggy Orenstein (born November 22, 1961) is the author of the ''New York Times'' bestsellers ''Boys & Sex, Girls & Sex,'' ''Cinderella Ate My Daughter'' and ''Waiting for Daisy,'' as well as ''Don’t Call Me Princess'', ''Flux'', and the classi ...
writes in her book, ''
Cinderella Ate My Daughter ''Cinderella Ate My Daughter: Dispatches From the Front Lines of the New Girlie-Girl Culture'' is a 2011 book written by Peggy Orenstein. The book explores the phenomenon of princess culture and in particular how the concept is marketed to young ...
'', that pink-coloured and princess-themed clothes are almost ubiquitous for young girls in shops in the United States. She sees this as problematic because it limits girls to not only one colour, but also to one spectrum of experience, and it "firmly fuses girls' identity to appearance." In reaction to this situation, a campaign group
Pinkstinks Pinkstinks is a campaign founded in London in May 2008 by twin sisters Emma Moore and Abi Moore (born 1971, London) to raise awareness of what they claim is damage caused by gender stereotyping of children. Pinkstinks claims that the marketi ...
was formed in the UK in 2008 to raise awareness of the
gender stereotyping A gender role, also known as a sex role, is a social role encompassing a range of behaviors and attitudes that are generally considered acceptable, appropriate, or desirable for a person based on that person's sex. Gender roles are usually cente ...
of children. Further, clothing companies have started to sell clothes that are unisex or gender-neutral, such as the Swedish company Polarn O. Pyret, while others have been founded specifically to offer such items, such as Tootsa MacGinty.''Unisex fashion: Hey boy, hey girl''
The Independent


See also

*
Infant clothing Infant clothing or baby clothing is clothing made for infants. Baby fashion is a social-cultural consumerist practice that encodes in children's fashion the representation of many social features and depicts a system characterized by differences ...
* Lolita fashion *
Sailor suit A sailor suit is a uniform traditionally worn by enlisted seamen in a navy or other governmental sea services. It later developed into a popular clothing style for children, especially as dress clothes. Origins and history In the Royal Navy, th ...
*
Youth culture Youth culture refers to the societal norms of children, adolescents, and young adults. Specifically, it comprises the processes and symbolic systems that are shared by the youth and are distinct from those of adults in the community. An emphasis ...


References


External links


Fashion Plates of 19th & 20th Century Children's Clothing
from The Metropolitan Museum of Art Libraries {{Authority control