“Mum have you seen these?” my nine-year-old daughter cries in delight as she shoves her hands into a previously undiscovered pair of pockets in her new dress. I know that delight. Most women do. Pockets in any clothes for women are possibly the best feature of the outfit. And yet most women’s clothes manufacturers still don’t get that: We. Love. Pockets.
But it’s not just pockets, for some reason a lot of clothes designed for women can be cumbersome and not designed for actual living. Hello, playsuits. It’s even worse when you’re a girl, and like most children want to run, and dance, and chase your friends or siblings around the yard. And did I mention, be able to go to the toilet easily? Yup I’m looking at you again playsuits/jumpsuits. I recently made the mistake of buying a playsuit for my daughter and if she needed to go to the toilet while wearing it, she would have to undo a tiny button around the back of her neck, take off the entire outfit and then do her business before pulling the whole thing back up again. Which means she’s only worn the outfit once.
It’s something I notice more now as my daughter gets older, how girls often just sit and talk while boys the same age are running around tearing about the place like kids do.
Compare her outfits to those of my sons. My sons have had a number of pockets on their clothes from the time they were babies. We would make fun of this – why exactly does a six-month old need pockets in his pants? Are they making baby wallets now? And let’s talk about material – boys’ clothes are often made of hardy cotton, or in winter, warm wool or fleece. My daughter has to put up with material that’s more for fashion than anything else. But this also has a lot to do with the fact that boys' clothing is functional. Girls' clothing is often fulfilling the fantasies of many mothers who want to play dress-up.
I had way more fun dressing my daughter than my sons. While I personally would never have worn dresses with stiff tutu skirts, my daughter did. She also wore sequins and fluffy coats and knew what a bolero jacket was by the time she was four. Now that she is nine, however, she decides what she wants to wear and that’s basically shorts and t-shirts in summer and jeans and jumpers in winter. This makes sense because it’s pretty much what I would wear. My days of dressing her up are over, and now that I’m starting to see sense I realise how girls clothing really does need an overhaul – just like is happening with girls’ school uniforms.
It wasn’t until recently that girls had to put up with wearing cumbersome uniforms to school. That’s until an 11-year-old called wrote to the WA Education Minister saying amongst other things, “I really love kicking the footy, netball and doing handstands at recess and lunch. It is annoying doing these things in a skirt.” The Minister agreed. This gave way to a policy change in WA last year, which meant that all girls in public schools within WA could choose to wear shorts or pants if they wanted. Victoria soon . And last month so did
When girls start to realise that they are embarrassing themselves by revealing their underwear in clothing that’s not meant for play they stop playing altogether.
Gone are the days where I have to force my daughter into her stiff white shirt, thick winter pinafore and grey tights that sagged. Now she wears her sports uniform which consists of pants or shorts and a school sports t-shirt – this is her school’s stop gap measure for girls who don’t want to wear the girls’ uniform. She no longer has to worry about her undies showing when she’s sitting cross-legged on the floor or doing cartwheels in the playground.
As Sofia Myhre noted, her clothing was getting in the way of her play. And it’s when girls start to realise that they are embarrassing themselves by revealing their underwear in clothing that’s not meant for play they stop playing altogether. It’s something I notice more now as my daughter gets older, how girls often just sit and talk while boys the same age are running around tearing about the place like kids do.
No one is saying that fashion isn’t fun. I love it just like the next person. But the fact of the matter is that girls are children, just like boys. And they love to play and run and get messy just like all kids do. By putting them in clothing that constricts movement or reveals their underwear, we could be subconsciously telling them that perhaps they should curb their desires to play, thereby getting in the way of their childhood. The last thing we want is to do that, because as we know, childhood is fleeting and we have a whole life that lies ahead where we need to work out how to get in and out of a playsuit.
