I Guess My Mom Thought I Was an Idiot
Wednesday, May 7th, 2008By Glinda
If you grew up in the seventies, then chances are you had a Garanimals outfit. I’m not ashamed to admit that I owned more than a few myself. Er, well, perhaps I should be, but there it is.
If you were not part of our exclusive Garanimals club, allow me to explain the concept. Garanimals took the children’s fashion world by storm when they introduced the concept of a matching system. By having labels, usually some sort of jungle animal, kids would be able to dress themselves by simply making sure that the labels were the same for both top and bottom. If you had two bears, your outfit was a surefire winner! There was no way you could walk out of the house in an unmatched outfit and embarass your mom! So, a supposedly idiot-proof system.
Why this concept has not been introduced for men, I am not sure. But, that is entirely a different post probably better suited to a different blog.
But really, isn’t being able to dress batshit-crazy some sort of three year old birthright? At that age, it is downright adorable to go grocery shopping wearing an orange striped shirt, red shorts, and a superman cape. Kids should dress like that as often as they can, because that window of opportunity gets slammed shut around the age of seven or so. At that point, the child will either be seen as destined for fashion greatness or someone who will never get invited to birthday parties.
Apparently the makers of Garanimals decided that a couple decades of freestyle dressing by America’s youth was too much for them to handle. They re-launched the brand in February of 2008, available exclusively at WalMart. Which sort of explains why I didn’t know about it until now.
So once again, children have the opportunity to match zebra to zebra and elephant to elephant! Forget about actually teaching them how to put clothes together, let’s have some faceless corporation do all the hard work for us! But according to Dr. Joyce Brothers, “Garanimals…helps the pre-schooler to handle his/her own wardrobe.” Remember Dr. Joyce Brothers? I thought not. Nothing like trotting out an almost thirty year old quote to inspire brand confidence!