👗 A Stranger Picked Her Outfit

Now that the back-to-school frenzy has finally started to settle, I wanted to share a moment from back-to-school shopping for my daughter. 

We needed new clothes for her (growing is great, needing new clothes every half a year or so…less great). I walked into a kids' clothing store (I won't say which one, because none of what I'm about to describe is unique to it) and stood at the entrance, took a deep breath, and scanned the room.

Not sure if anyone else feels this way but sometimes shopping is overwhelming. Decision fatigue to the nth degree. You pick up things you didn't intend to buy. You start comparing prices on your phone to a different store while standing inside the physical location of this one. I've gotten into the habit of pausing at the door and getting my bearings before going in (it has crossed my mind more than once that people may think I walked into the wrong store).

As usual - the girls' side was pastel, soft, pink, purple, some yellow and red. The boys' side was blue, orange, gray, black, green. I stood there and tried to imagine what a store might look like if it didn't have this differentiation. Then I wondered whether there might actually be more decision fatigue to sort through, since we're so used to the store doing some of the sorting for us.

I resigned myself to walking toward the “girls' side.” Her preferences are already set: pink and purple, blue or green depending on the shade, no to black or gray. I've tried over the years to buy her clothes across a wider range of colors, and it's getting harder. The shirt with the character she likes only comes in blue in the boys’ section, as if girls don’t watch that cartoon. I could buy her something from the “boys' side”, and I sometimes do, but there's no obvious reason a character should only live on one side of the room.

Sometimes I wander into the boys' section out of curiosity. Every time, I'm reminded of just how stereotyped this is, and I wonder how much work it would take to actually remove or soften it.

Meet Teena

A few weeks ago I wrote about how pink got assigned to girls and blue to boys, and how that got flipped in the middle of the last century. If you missed it, here's the link. That piece was about which color got put on which side. Teena is about an age group, I think you can probably guess which one.

In 1944, Seventeen magazine launched. At that point, "teenage girl" wasn't yet a market advertisers knew how to think about. Estelle Ellis, hired at 25 as the magazine's promotional director, was the person who had to sell them on it. She surveyed Seventeen's readers on their activities, finances, and spending habits, and used the data to build a fictional character named Teena.

Teena was 16 years old, 5'4", 118 pounds. Her aspirations were to go to college, marry, and stay home. She was, in the marketing sense, an ideal avatar - complete with demographics (the objective descriptors - age, height, weight, income, education, location) and psychographics (the internal stuff - aspirations, values, attitudes, lifestyle, motivations). 

Ellis sent advertisers booklets called Life with Teena. The purpose was to get companies to realize that teenage girls were worth selling to. One of Ellis's promotional lines was: unlike her older sisters, every teenager wants to look almost like every other teenager.

Teena worked. 

From sixteen down to eighteen months

Over the decades, the same concept has appeared at younger and younger ages. In the last while, videos and articles have been circulating about the differences in boys' and girls' clothing at ages nowhere near sixteen.

At identical age labels, boys' shorts can run inches longer than girls'. The inseams are significantly more narrow in the girls’ shorts even though pediatric data shows us that prior to puberty, the skeletal and body proportions of boys and girls are virtually identical.

Almost 100 % of boys' shorts have functional pockets. Fewer than half of girls' do. Researchers call these differences "aging up." Adult sexualized styling showing up on girls' clothing at earlier and earlier ages.

My daughter is six so she doesn't shop in the teen section (yet). But the section her clothes come from runs on the same Teena-logic. An idealized “standard” that was built from surveying many families who have already been exposed to and living in these standards for years. It’s a cycle of self-fulfilling prophecies. 

I finished shopping that day and the pink shirt with the character she likes went in the basket. She'll love it, and she should, because it's what she asked for. I thought about Ellis's line again on the way out. Every teenager wants to look almost like every other teenager. I thought about those posts comparing girls’ shorts to boys’.

I felt a little helpless, then I paid and left. 

A Thought To Carry Forward:

A standard built from surveying families already living inside it is why redefining it is so hard.