Dress Code

American Studies Professor Paoletti’s new book deciphers the language of kids’ clothing.By Monette Austin Bailey, TERP 

By Monette Austin Bailey, TERP

Dressed comfortably in her brother’s plain, hand-me-down T-shirts and blue jeans, a young Jo Paoletti sewed clothes for her Ginny doll and dreamed of becoming a fashion designer, before she’d pursue her career as a cowboy.

Paoletti, now an associate professor of American studies at Maryland, understands that her freedom to explore traditionally male and female apparel and interests—without people questioning her gender identity—has a complicated history.

Researching her new book, “Pink and Blue: Telling the Boys from the Girls in America,” Paoletti discovered the distinction involves much more than colors. The book, published in February by Indiana University Press, is the result of Paoletti’s 30-year quest to answer this simple question: When did we start dressing girls in pink and boys in blue?

“There’s no one point in history when this was decided. I was hoping there was; it would’ve made my research simpler,” she says. “It depended on where you lived; what rules you were following, if any; your ethnicity … I was surprised at how complicated this was.”

Even before its release, the book has generated buzz from WAMU’s Kojo Nnamdi and foreign journalists. An expert on gender and clothing, she also frequently provides insight into national conversations on this topic. She was interviewed for a New York Times Magazine article on princess culture and was the focus of a Smithsonian magazine piece. FoxNews.com solicited her comments on the debate about a J. Crew ad featuring a mom painting her little boy’s toenails pink. Discovery.com sought her expertise on raising a genderless child, and she appeared on BBC Radio to comment on the U.K.-based Pink Stinks movement.

Susan B. Kaiser, a professor and master adviser in the Division of Textiles and Clothing at the University of California, Davis, calls “Pink and Blue” an “interdisciplinary tour de force.”

With children’s clothing sales estimated to top $43 billion in 2011, what parents put on their offspring is big business. Children’s clothing choices, driven in large part by the industry’s
marketing machine, are also attached  to adults’ psyches.

“We care about our kids, their identities, and … it matters because we’re not sure. There’s a lot of anxiety parents have about children’s sexuality. Little boys don’t know that their wanting to wear pink causes their parents to head for the phone to call a psychiatrist,” Paoletti says.

That explains the dustups caused in the past year by parents who’ve taken less traditional stances. In Toronto, a family is raising eyebrows by choosing not to identify its youngest child’s gender. A little boy from Seattle unwittingly became a national topic last year when his mom wrote a book about her “princess boy.”

This insecurity about gender identification doesn’t extend to girls. “At the turn of the last century, it was thought that it was good for a girl to go through the tomboy phase,” says Paoletti. It was their sexuality that came, and still comes, into question with clothing choices.

“For girls, part of the problem is that the way we define femininity is by sexual attractiveness. If you really look at feminine clothes, they’re about ‘How sexually available do I want to look?’”

In her book, Paoletti focuses on the clothing of children up to about the age of 7, about the time they learn gender-appropriate dress and apply it to their identities. After combing through old catalogs, patterns, baby books, paper doll collections, children’s literature and related sources, Paoletti found that infant boys and girls were dressed as “asexual cherubs” through the early 1900s—wearing white gowns and generic rompers.

Clothing distinctions occurred more between groups: infants, toddlers (gowns swapped for pants to ease walking) and older children (more prints used). Pink, along with other pastel hues, was just a baby color. Several factors contributed to what Paoletti calls the current “reign of pink” as a girl color: Feminists rejecting pink in the 1970s as a feminine marker actually gave it more weight. Parents in the mid-’80s, who were raised in the unisex overalls and turtlenecks of the ’60s
and ’70s, wanted more distinction for their children.

And just as parents in the late 1800s weren’t comfortable creating small versions of distinctly male or female clothing, says Paoletti, neither are today’s parents comfortable with gender ambiguity.

Girls can now wear shades of blue and still be girls, though boys aren’t afforded the same consideration when wearing pink. Since social norms and gender expression are constantly shifting, she acknowledges that her book is not a definitive work and hopes that it sparks continuing research by others.

“Jo’s work allows us to step back and see the importance of what children are wearing—not simply the aesthetics, but the meaning of clothing, the social … manipulation,” says Kathleen Rowold, professor and interim chair of Indiana University’s apparel merchandising and interior design department.

Paoletti, whose daughter and son are in their 20s, just wants to help people understand that what children wear is as much a function of their environment as their preferences. And it doesn’t have any solid bearing on what they’ll be when they grow up.

“Ask any parent how easy it is to get a child to be what you want them to be,” she says. “If it were that easy, we’d all be dressing our kids like Einstein.”