What message that sends out to children and adults
I found something.
A Facebook group, Let Clothes Be Clothes.
Down with gender-separated clothes.
Let Clothes be Clothes is asking retailers in the UK to rethink how they design and market children’s clothing. Just like many of our supporters, we’re concerned about how colours, styles and themes are split into for girls or for boys, and what message that sends out to children and adults. Children should decide their own interests, favourite colours and wear the styles they find most comfortable and enjoyable to wear.
Please send us your photographs, petition links and blog posts, and help us promote a more positive culture that offers a full range of options to every child, encourages gender equality, prevents bullying and lets children be children.
Please follow us on Twitter @letclothesbe
Sounds like a fine idea to me.
Target stores just recently decided to eliminate gender labels for children’s non-clothing items (e.g., toys, etc). One small step forward……
Yes, the gender-free clothes iteration was inspired by the gender-free toys one.
I appreciate Target’s step, but it is a small step indeed. Now they need to do a better job at not choosing (and steering designers away from) the gendered products themselves. Not having to get clothes for a small person, you might not appreciate the extreme extent to which kids’ products are gendered today – clothes, toys, TV shows, games and learning apps, books – it’s utterly pervasive and I feel helpless to counteract it because it would be a full-time job to try to curate a more gender-neutral environment for my kid.
Wow, that’s infuriating.
For books, at least, you can get old ones pretty easily, but all the rest of that stuff, not.
As I recall, at least one of the major toy companies are divided into boy and girl divisions at a high level. Some article a while back about a toy being pitched said that it had to be decided right away whether to aim at boys or girls, as one division or the other needed to produce it. How ridiculous.
I can’t for the life of me understand why any manufacturer decides to exclude half their potential market from the get-go. Why do none of them see it that way?
Plus, any manufacturer who makes T Rex sad is totally in for trouble.