Opinions on Baby Clothes

Opinions on Baby Clothes

I used to think shopping for women's clothes was depressing. Then I tried shopping for baby clothes. The good news: it will not make you feel bad about your body shape. The bad news: it may make you feel bad about our entire culture.

I used to think that while I dislike our gender stereotypes, I was at least familiar with them. Then I discovered that baby clothes have whole new rules. It is not until you understand these that you discover just how gender-neutral the adult world is. Visible signs of gender mean that you do not have to have quite so many rules in such detail. All baby clothes must be gender coded, so no color can be allowed to be neutral, except for yellow and green, which are reserved for this purpose in case you need to buy something for a baby of unknown gender. All yellow works; only some greens do. A few mid-greens are gender neutral, but intense greens are boy colors, while pale greens are girl colors. Motifs must also be gender coded whenever possible (butterflies and flowers are girls; motor vehicles and tools are boys; gender neutral outfits have baby items or animals on them, generally)

This leads to some surprises, at least from my point of view. For instance, bright red is normally a boy's color. All shades of purple are girl's colors (this is the only deep or intense color not categorizeable as "pink" that belongs to girls). A bright red outfit with a whale on it is a boy outfit. I would have guessed "girl", because I always thought red was a girl color, but no, it's "boy", because it's red, and because fundamentally everything relatively gender neutral is considered boy clothing. It's only girl clothing if it's pink or frilly.

Not that boys are any better off; 90% of boy's clothing is themed around war or sports, with a sprinkling of things with big engines and large, carnivorous animals, and the occasional 'miniature adult' outfit. All sorts of colors may be "boy" colors, but nonetheless, 90% of boy clothes are navy, orange, army green and khaki. I do buy my daughter mostly boy clothes, but I have to work hard to find them, and people are less worried by this than they would be by dressing a boy in girl clothes. Besides, it's possible to make any color or print acceptable for a girl by making it into a skirt (or, sometimes, just a frill) -- no similar transformation is possible for boys. If you take that pink flowery fabric, and make a perfect set of miniature army fatigues, embroidered with guns, tanks, and slavering lions, you have just made a perverse girl's outfit. No number of "boy" signifiers will make something sufficiently boyish if it contains even one strong "girl" signifier.

Sizing baby clothes

Baby clothes have sizes shown by months, as in 0-3 months. This seems like an attractive system -- if you know how old the baby is, you know what size it wears, right? Then somebody tells you that a 1-month old normally wears 3-6 month sizes, and you find something marked "3 months", and the whole thing loses its coherence. Fundamentally, there are four problems with the system:

1. Babies vary enormously in size. The range for "normal" in a full-term newborn is about 6 pounds to about 10 pounds. And lots of people still have babies outside that range. Clothes are therfore sized for the middle of the bell curve, and good luck to you if you're at one end or the other. Happily, most manufacturers will tell you what weights as well as what ages a given size is supposed to cover, and the weight is more accurate.
2. Babies grow rapidly. 1-2 pounds a month is normal in the beginning. That 6-pound newborn may double in weight by 3 months; how can one set of clothes manage this? By being a lot too large at the begining and and just a tiny bit too small at the end, so 0-3 months really means "3 months, and we hope you don't mind swimming in it for a month or so". (This is why some clothes just straight out say "3 months"; it's the same thing as 0-3.)
3. Babies also vary in shape. Opal outgrew all her 0-3 month clothes with feet weeks before the shirts. She's a long, lean, leggy baby. Clothes made for round babies stopped snapping at the crotch well before they hit their supposed limit, and one of her 0-3 month outfits was too short for her to straighten her legs in a 2 months, with plenty of width to spare. Different manufacturers make different bets as to shape, alas, and occasionally they vary from piece to piece anyway.
4. Different manufacturers choose different specifications for weights per age. So if you know that your baby weighs 14 pounds, which is 3-6 months in most manufacturers, you still have to search out the manufacturer's table for weights and ages before buying anything from a new place, as this is 0-3 months for some manufacturers.

What to do? Buy by weight, and when in doubt buy the next size up, as babies almost never shrink, and almost always grow.

Our rules for baby clothes

• No pink. And Paul, in particular, really means "NO PINK". No deep, intense pink; no white with small pink decorative bits; no ashes-of-roses pinky grey or brown. The furthest he will go is to accept very, very small amounts of pink in things like animal noses, or swamped by very large amounts of intense purple. (I therefore end up dressing her in pink while he's at work just so as not to waste perfectly good clothes that were gifts, especially since I'm more relaxed about the whole pink thing. Not that I like pink, but I'm open to believing that a broader range of things are not really pink, or can be pink because they're otherwise interesting.)
• No frills. OK, maybe the occasional frill. One or two bows, say. A subtle decorative edging. One ruffle. But not all on the same outfit.
• Nothing that actually says "Boy" on it. Yes, I mean I find outfits that are otherwise acceptable but that have "Daddy's boy" or "I'm a boy" or some such embroidered on them.
• It would be really nice if it didn't make people accuse us of being confused. I'm only willing to buy the occasional outfit with big carnivorous animals or big engines on it (yes, she does have a "junior aviator" outfit with an airplane) and I try, with limited success, to avoid the very blue, very boyish things. Even Paul sometimes gets tired of explaining and picks an intentionally gender-neutral or girly outfit to dress her in.
• No war. If she wants to wear a uniform, she can join the military. Or even the girl scouts. Neither of which will take her before she masters sitting up!
• No sports. Again, if she wants to wear sportswear, she can take up a sport. Drooling does not count, and she'll probably have to master throwing things on purpose instead of by accident first.
• Dark clothes are just fine. All those people who say you can't dress babies in dark colors because spitup shows more? Hah! Maybe it's a breastmilk/formula thing, but once you wipe off the solids, what determines whether her spitup shows is mostly solid color vs. pattern (pattern good, solid color bad) and some hard-to-characterize factor in fabric type. Her purchased mass-market pale-color onesies often show watermarks, whereas the sundress I made her in black with dark purple and yellow man-eating flowers can be completely soaked without noticeable effect.
• Cheap is good. She's going to grow out of them soon, and she's going to coat them in noxious substances on a regular basis. So unless it's absolutely perfect, why spend lots of money on it? That way you worry less about the fact that you're only lukewarm about it.
• Frivolity is good. Babies can get away with wearing anything, so why not man-eating flowers and rainbow tie-dye? She is not going to interview for any jobs, and nobody will take her seriously until she can talk more and drool less, no matter what she's wearing.
• Opal did not have a waist until she was nearly a year old. It's not her fault; that's just what small babies are like. But it does mean that those cute little blue jeans are either going to cut into her or fall off; there's really no middle ground. And, while we're at it, that cute little T-shirt that goes with it will ride up under her armpits within seconds (if it were tight enough not to, it would be impossible to get on.) Why people make these things is beyond me. Overalls and shirts with crotch snaps are the only way to go.
• It does not need to be new. Baby clothes get hard wear, but not for very long, particularly in the smaller sizes.
• Skirts are fine. Those people who say they can't crawl in dresses? I guess some babies are like that. Short of actually stapling the clothes to something, you could not slow Opal down by choosing clothes.