Children's clothing or kids' clothing is clothing for children who have not yet grown to full height. Grandma bait is a retail industry term for expensive children's clothing. Children's clothing is often more casual than adult clothing, fit for play and rest. Hosiery is commonly used. More recently, however, a lot of childrenswear is heavily influenced by trends in adult fashion. Due to the rise of social media platforms such as Instagram, celebrities and fashion bloggers have been using their accounts to post pictures of their children wearing luxury "street style" clothing, thus inspiring parents to dress their children as they would dress themselves. Children's clothing is care about their health. Good quality, well designed, garments are now a priority for a growing number of parents and children's clothing is getting a prime place in top label stores and high-end fashion retail outlets. Dresses are also getting separately designed for boys and girls at a very early age.
History
Function
Function and design must meet at the right proportions in children's clothes for it to be popular and accepted. Fabric choices, openings and fastenings, fit and ease, trimmings used are all major considerations when designing children's wear. Some other factors a designer designing for children's clothing should focus on are the changing shape of the growing kid and different proportions of the different parts of the body. Leisure wear and sports wear are two very prominent design styles in children's clothing. Girls clothing are available in a wide range and styles. Children's clothing is also sometimes worn by adult midgets, dwarves or short people.
Sizes
American sizes for baby clothes are usually based on the child's weight. European sizes are usually based on the child's height. These may be expressed as an estimated age of the child, e.g., size 6 months is expected to fit a child in height and in weight.
More recently gender-specific children's clothing has become a contentious issue. According to some feminist thinkers, children's clothing has become increasingly segregated, with young girls especially being expected to wear pink. Peggy Orenstein writes in her book, Cinderella Ate My Daughter, that pink-coloured and princess-themed clothes are almost ubiquitous for young girls in shops in America. She sees this as problematic because it limits girls to not only one colour, but also to one spectrum of experience, and it "firmly fuses girls' identity to appearance." According to Historian Jo B. Paoletti, pink and blue only became associated with girls and boys respectively from the 1940s onwards. In reaction to this situation, a campaign groupPinkstinks was formed in the UK in 2008 to raise awareness of what they claim is damage caused by gender stereotyping of children. Further, clothing companies have started to sell clothes that are unisex or gender-neutral, such as Swedish companies Polarn O. Pyret, while others have been founded specifically to offer such items, such as Tootsa MacGinty.
