The Mothers' and Daughters' Clothing Store

This fantasy was first shared with AC when a couple of e-friends were wailing about the latest fad to hit certain stores--bikinis for primary school girls. I'm not so much worried about the idea that bras are being made for elementary school girls as I am about the idea that there are little girls who are getting so much involuntary hormone supplementation, partly through the meat and milk of hormone-tortured animals, that we're seeing reports of five-year-old girls who need bras. Not your daughter, not my niece, but apparently this is happening to some children in real life. What sort of adult life is possible after a girl has developed breasts at age five? Data aren't in yet.

But if you worry that buying your little girl "fashions" inspired by what's worn on the corners of mean streets is likely to attract sexual predators, why not do something positive with your emotions? Why not join forces with other concerned mothers to start a fashion backlash? Why not organize your own store?

Somewhere in the back corner of a sub-basement in my mind (since I don't actually like retail sales) an idea for a woman-owned, woman-inspired fashion business has been gathering dust for about thirty years. My original idea was to open a store that would sell clothes that suited my purposes...clothes that didn't demand that every woman be built like Diana Spencer, stockings that actually protected legs in winter, shoes that made feet happy. Sarah Ferguson and Barbara Bush brought my kind of clothes into the height of fashion (except the stockings), but now we have this new wave of concern about the sleazy effect of "fashions" designed for elementary school girls.

Whether a little girl needs a bra or not, she does need a little adult guidance about the kind of fashion image she wants to project. Rather than get into the issues of what "predators" would want to do to a child, and why, I'd be more comfortable saying something like, "Some grown-ups wear clothes that make other grown-ups think they look cheap or stupid, and some grown-ups wear clothes that make other grown-ups think they look smart and classy, regardless of how pretty the clothes may be. If you want to look like a grown-up, I want you to look like the respectable kind."

Of course, the best thing women can do for little girls, in this direction, is look good in preppy, yuppie, or casual styles ourselves. I'm not saying that we have to burn all our "sexy" things the minute we become mothers, aunts, or teachers, but I am saying that the place for those styles was in the bedroom all along. Men like to see us in "different" costumes now and then. Fine. Crop the tops, slit the skirts, take tucks in everything and wear hooker shoes with it...at home. The hooker look is fun in the bedroom, but nothing even leaning in that direction has ever brought me anything but hassles on the street.

Anyway, this fantasy is about the store where we sell classy clothes to our daughters. One of the rules for this store would be: No nagging. No preaching. An e-friend with whom I shared this fantasy wanted to name the store after a wonderful, funny book that should probably be sold in the store, Stop Dressing Your Six-Year-Old Like a Skank (visit the author here). That's not the name I have in mind.

Personally, subject to yourall's input of course, I like "Rivenbark" as the name of a store chain. It honors the author of our inspirational book, and it has a nice Old English and/or Native American sound. Traditionally bark was riven off trees to produce heat, light, written messages, or clothing. We like all those things, right?

Another very important rule for this store: Local is better. One store outlet would not sell the same clothes as another store outlet. Only generic pieces of outfits, like jeans and white shirts, would be the same for every store. The idea would be to promote things local craftswomen made by hand.

The International Ladies Garment Workers Union would be welcome to chip in their two cents worth, at this store, when and only when they had brought the job of making women's clothes back into the United States. As long as the big chain stores are selling exclusively mass-produced garments made by virtual slaves in poor countries, I.L.G.W.U. spokespeople should be identified by the sackcloth and ashes they wear to show repentance while they contemplate a strategy for undoing the harm they've done.

Another rule: I don't do sales. It's a law of nature: Young, thin, pretty women sell women's clothes. I've never really looked thin, being top-heavy even when I weighed 90 pounds, and I don't want to look as young as the women most of us want to dress like. I do knitting, and if the store actually existed and needed it I could do sewing. I could also recruit young, beautiful women with no experience in more satisfying jobs to do the sales.

Another rule: Everything has to be accessibly priced. We could sell generic pieces of outfits secondhand to pay what the work is worth and offset the cost of selling hand-made clothes at prices that won't create panic in parents who usually buy their children's clothes at Target, or even Wal-Mart. Maybe a hand-made sweater should cost a little more than a Wal-Mart sweater...but not outrageously much more.

Another rule: If parents find out that their daughters are showing off their nice clothes and making other little girls feel inadequate, we have to rig up some sort of "drawing" and give the lower-income families vouchers for a few cool clothing items too. We want little girls to be proud of their style, their ability to choose things that look really good together and on them, but not their ability to con Mommy and Daddy out of more money than some other kid can.

Five rules is enough for this article, so please, Concerned Moms, take it away.

(There doesn't seem to be a way to contact celiarivenbark.com without "configuring Microsoft Outlook," which doesn't work on a shared computer. If anybody out there has Outlook, will someone please send this link to the author?)

SOME SOURCES FOR FURTHER READING (more online stories about the early puberty phenomenon)

Jeanne Heida, "Is There a Connection Between Bovine Growth Hormone and Early Puberty?", Associated Content: http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/573571/is_there_a_connection_between_bovine.html?cat=25

CBS News, "Puberty Starting Early for Many Girls": http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2011/04/12/earlyshow/living/parenting/main20053084.shtml

Kidshealth.org:
http://kidshealth.org/parent/medical/sexual/precocious.html#
(I find this one annoying, with its implication that the worst part of early puberty, when it's not caused by a tumor, will be teasing from other kids. Maybe you have to have watched a normal, even borderline gifted, child cope with teachers who are physically afraid of him or her to feel as annoyed by this article as I do.)

University of Michigan:
http://www.med.umich.edu/yourchild/topics/puberty.htm

Mayo Clinic:
http://www.mayoclinic.com/health/precocious-puberty/DS00883
The Mayo Clinic is generally a reliable online source for health information, but when I clicked on this ad and saw a color photo of high-fashion, high-cut shorts outfits for girls, I threw up my hands!