How to talk to your children about fashion
Choosing what to wear is the most significant act of self-presentation in which we engage, writes Gavanndra Hodge
For this conversation I am going to focus on children entering their teenage years. Not just because this is what I am in the midst of but because this seems to me a flash moment, and the one most likely to cause the wrong sorts of conversations — shouty ones, in which we use phrases such as: “You’re not going out looking like that.”
Prior to this, dressing children is one of life’s joys. Their wardrobes are full of colourful, comfortable clothes and no one minds if their socks don’t match. I remember momentarily thinking that
it would be fun if I too could wear rainbow-striped leggings and “bear bum” woolly tights rather than the standard-issue black jeans and polo neck, but then realised I wasn’t a CBeebies presenter, so, no.
It doesn’t take long for children to start closing the door to change, emerging wearing cargo pants and Brandy Melville tank tops. This is when the conversation becomes serious, and not just because we might be using our “serious voice” when we say, “You need to change into tights that don’t have huge holes in them”, but because fashion is serious. As the German philosopher Georg Hegel said: “It is fashion that gives the body’s attitude its relief.” But I think Virginia Woolf saw it more clearly when she wrote, in her gender shape-shifting novel Orlando: “It is clothes that wear us, and not we them; we may make them take the mould of arm or breast, but they would mould our hearts, our brains, our tongues to their liking.”
Choosing what to wear is the most significant act of self-presentation in which we engage. How much more important this must be to a teenager in the midst of their own shape-shifter moment, trying to establish who they are often with the help of clothes — literally “trying on” different identities.
The first thing to do in this conversation is to dispel the notion that fashion — or your child’s interest in it – might be trivial, vain or frivolous. Quite the opposite; fashion is a coherent and detailed semiotic system (Roland Barthes even wrote a book about it). It is constantly evolving and replenishing, responding to its context and raiding its history — as its etymology would suggest, coming, ultimately, from the Latin verb facere, meaning “to make”.
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The frequent changes of the fashion calendar might be overwhelming for the average adult, but to a child hungry for experimentation they are exciting. When I was a teenager my fashion identity changed term by term. I arrived at secondary school a tomboy, quickly became a goth, but by the start of the lower fourth I was a raver. These were skins that were easily sloughed off to be replaced by something new in a way that seemed natural to me, inevitable, even, but inexplicable to my adults.
I would talk to your child about their clothing choices rather than commenting on them, which can only ever be annoying. You might learn something about where your child is at right now. Then take the conversation wider. I would tell them to wear what makes them feel comfortable, that fashion is art, is language. Accept that they might feel differently about it than you, but the way they feel isn’t wrong. The only thing that’s wrong is fashion that makes you feel unhappy, too big or too small, too cold, too poor, too much like you are not being yourself. Fashion is an aura, an extension of ourselves, a game, a tool. And it’s a two-way street: when we look good we feel good.
If a child loves fashion, teach them to respect their clothes, to fold them neatly, hang them properly. Teach them about the environmental impact of fast fashion and encourage them to mend what they have; to stitch, to handle a sewing machine. Give them the means to make the magic. There are courses and clubs that teach the rudiments of clothes-making (Make Mee Studio and Sew Pretty in London, for instance).
And if they ask to borrow your clothes, feel flattered. But never, ever ask to borrow theirs.
