Mari Rysst: The dialectic of the erotic and the chaste: ethical dilemmas in the creation of children’s clothes
Social anthropologist/Researcher SIFO
In the last ten years or so different Norwegian media have every now and again written about children looking too old for their age or becoming too old too soon. Clothes for preteen children have increasingly been designed as imitations of teenage clothes, which have made both political authorities and parents react to what they see as a potential disappearance of childhood.
The paper is about 10 year old girls. From an anthropological perspective it discusses ethical dilemmas understood to exist in the design of children’s clothes based on these girls’ and their families’ experiences in relation to their wider social contexts. The ethical dilemmas concern first and foremost how clothes for young girls are to be designed in order to be morally acceptable. What is ‘morally acceptable’ varies across time, culture and the influence of dominant Norwegian childhood discourses. These include ideas of the innocent child, the competent child and the cool child. The notions serve as an ideological background for how children’s presentations of self, including clothes, are interpreted and understood by themselves and others. The discourses include cultural models on what is a ‘child’ and are also implicitly encompassed in the dialectic of the erotic and the chaste. I argue that an ambivalence and anxiety regarding sexual innocence and agency lies at the core of these ethical dilemmas.
Fashion designers creating children’s clothes are simultaneously faced with at least three challenges and dilemmas. The clothes must be fashionable and preferably praised by colleagues; the clothes must not provoke the protectors of the innocent childhood; and the clothes must appeal to both parents and children. The designers have to balance between these positions, which is a relatively new situation concerning children’s clothes. However, for women, moral design dilemmas have existed for a long time and circle around the dialectic between concealment versus exposure. Fashion for women has a long history of being designed through a dialectic relationship of the erotic and the chaste, which in this paper is discussed in relation to young girls’ clothes. From being primarily positioned at the modesty pole, the last decade has seen a move towards the other. And it is exactly in this dialectic that the ethical dilemmas concerning the design of young girls’ clothes are to be found.
The paper shows that 10 year-old girls vary as to how interested and conscious they are of clothes and fashion. It was only the popular and leading group and their associates who openly declared an interest in these matters. It is common that parents buy their children clothes, often in negotiation with their daughters. This is so even among those girls aspiring to a cool and teenage like style. Therefore the dialectic of the erotic and the chaste is well illustrated in the intergenerational negotiations.
In their construction of gender as 10 year-old girls, the paper argues that they have internalised the cultural schema of suitable clothes for young girls which implies that they should not expose certain body parts and skin, which is yucky, but that this changes and is acceptable when they get older. They want cool teenage-like clothes which older people may interpret as ‘sexy’, but themselves as only ‘cool’. The cultural schema of being sexy is not found to have motivational force among the children and is not part of their understanding of the cool. This leads to an intergenerational gap of (mis)understanding. Children and adults understand (sexy) fashion clothes differently because their bodies have different experiences of bodily maturation and sexuality. The paper argues that this intergenerational gap in interpretation of fashionable children represents the core in the ethical dilemmas concerning the creation of children’s clothes.