Beyoncé and Kim Kardashian might get away with it for their star offspring but designer childrenswear is a waste

Babies in drop-crotch skinny jeans? Shoes so rigid a toddler can’t walk? Styling youngsters in the latest high fashion is a bizarre but lucrative industry innovation

Reading Time:3 minutes

Beyoncé’s daughter, Blue Ivy, aged seven, already has an enviable wardrobe. Picture: AP

Published: 8:00pm, 13 Jun 2019Updated: 8:10pm, 13 Jun 2019

When I was a child, I suggested to my stylish mother that we wear matching outfits. She explained unequivocally that it would never happen. Oh, how times have changed. Almost every designer brand now offers shrunken replicas from their ready-to-wear lines, and children are “twinning” their parents in designer fashion more than ever before.

Extending her personal brand, Kim Kardashian has coordinated outfits with daughter North West for years. The children of famous people and what they wear have become intensely scrutinised and often carefully styled, from Beyoncé and Jay Z’s daughter Blue Ivy to, well, all the Beckhams. And it has significantly affected sales.

The global childrenswear market, worth more than US$200 billion, has grown at a phenomenal rate in the past decade or so. That is just a fraction of the US$1.3 trillion in retail sales of apparel globally, but luxury childrenswear in particular has seen annual growth in recent years of 3 to 4 per cent, regularly outpacing womenswear and menswear. It should come as no surprise that Hong Kong is in the eye of the storm. According to market research agency Euromonitor, Asia-Pacific is the fastest growing and largest region for childrenswear, and particularly China since the loosening of the one-child policy was announced in 2013.

Evidence can also be found in the baffling outfits I’ve witnessed at playgroups. Babies whose crawling is encumbered by drop-crotch skinny jeans. A Burberry trench for the sandpit at nursery school. Miniature versions of the latest trainers so clunky they make toddlers trip over. Fur-lined Moncler jackets in the playground, in 18 degrees Celsius. By comparison, my son has grown up in hand-me-downs from friends supplemented by second-hand items from Retykle.com, and H&M’s Conscious collection. I like to think he looks good, but I’m more focused on comfort and freedom of movement in non-toxic materials.

The consensus is that image-conscious millennial parents care about quality, too, but they also want their offspring to represent their personal brand. This is, after all, a demographic that communicates through Instagram. Having children later has also given them greater spending power by the time they are parents, and marketers have been wise to this. Children’s photo contests harnessing the power of social-media campaigns have drawn in thousands, because who doesn’t think their child is the cutest? Hence the rise of the Instatot, child fashion influencers such as Coco Pink Princess, an eight year old from Tokyo who has 688,000 followers on Instagram.