Shopping for girls

Maybe this can be my “international women’s day” post.

We went shopping yesterday, after a very long time. We had to shop for all three of us (wife, daughter and I). And we went to a few large stores in Mantri Mall and ended up shopping in the men’s section, women’s section, girls’ section and boys’ section.

You read that right. We shopped in the boys’ section. And no, we didn’t buy anything for gifting. The reason we shopped in the boys’ section was to buy our daughter nice clothes.

Last week, union minister Smriti Irani made this statement somewhere:

The problem is that even if we as parents want to be progressive and want to bring up our daughter without creating gender biases, the world conspires to reinforce gender biases into her. We find that visiting relatives and friends gift her Barbie dolls. There is “pattern recognition” from things she sees around her (last year she shocked us by saying that it was OK for a boy to hit others but not for a girl). Boys her age are not beyond making sexist comments.

But the biggest reinforcer of childhood gender norms, we’ve seen, are clothes shops, and this is a thing we’ve seen both in the UK and in India.

For some reason, clothes manufacturers have collectively decided that the only thing little girls want to wear is bling – every shirt, and skirt, and pair of shorts, and shoes, inevitably have some frills or some bling attached to them. Beyond a point, as we are shopping, it becomes unbearable to even consider such clothes. And we naturally gravitate towards the boys’ section.

Where, for whatever reason, the selection is far more palatable. No-frill (pun intended) T-shirts and comfortable trousers are conspicuous by their abundance. The design on the printed T-shirts are far better (like last year we got her a T-shirt with the nine (clearly a pre-2005 design) planets on it, which she loves wearing). Shoes are comfortable and you can actually run in them.

At pretty much any given point of time in her entire lifetime, the daughter has owned at least half a dozen pieces of clothing that have been shopped from boys’ sections of clothes shops.

There are limitations, of course – that women’s shirts have buttons on the left means that it is easy to identify “cross-dressing” when it comes to polos and button-down shirts. A lot of boys’ clothes are franchise driven, and not the sort of franchises that my wife or I would endorse (there is an overabundance of Disney stuff, such as Marvel, and not enough heavy metal).

And we were worried that once the daughter learnt to read, she would herself start objecting to wearing clothes bought from boys’ section – thankfully, until now at least, that fear hasn’t borne out. She happily selected clothes from boys’ sections yesterday, and even bought a cute T-shirt that said “King of … “.

I really don’t know when children’s clothes designers and merchandisers realise that girls want nice clothes as well – and not just frills and bling. Until then, as long as the daughter approves that is, we’ll be shopping in the boys’ section.

One thought on “Shopping for girls”

  1. Haha, why do I only have such people far away from me :-(. 3 years back- some sweatshirts were good in mens section and womens section was all bright bright. So I advised the wife to pick one from mens; she said “are you mad, you and your stupid logical reasons. Keep it with you”.

    Now too, when we shop for our 5yo daughter , I suggest her to look for some pants in boys section too. And she does like them there, but insists that the girls section is not nice in that shop because I have to take her to a better branded shop..

    2 times so far, I went ahead and brought the pants from mens section and the wife and daughter are blissfully unaware about it.

    Daughter too insists on the stereotyping. I know and understand that it is her will after all, but she refuses to buy anything other than dolls and kitchen sets. And I am so done with buying those 🙁

    She plays with them for 1 day, but prefers playing with the boys in the corridors ?

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