Teeny Manolo

I’m sure you’ve heard by now from one source or another about the study results released yesterday about how SNACKS ARE EVIL and DESTROYING OUR YOUTH.

Can I get a communal groan from the peanut gallery?

I’m sorry, but this is yet another study in which people (read: fat haters, of which there are an alarmingly large amount) get all hysterical and finger-pointy at us poor parents.  Who are obviously doing everything wrong.

My son is as skinny as the proverbial rail.  When I buy him pants, we have to notch the waistband as tightly as possible, or else he will find himself inadvertently displaying his drawers to the public.

Does he eat some unhealthy snacks?

Hell yes.

You see, I believe that it is important to give kids choices in life, and to not micromanage every single thing that passes their lips.  Believe it or not, even though he has unhealthier options available to him, he often chooses healthy ones first.

Even more key? Getting him out of the house and running around.

But you know what? He is lucky because we can afford healthy foods, and we live in an area that provides ample open and park spaces in which to play.

It’s been noted by people more scholarly than myself that socioeconomic levels have a lot to do with children and their exposure to healthy food and lifestyle choices.

 Why don’t people get all riled up about that?

Yes, the fashion shows are lovely and exciting, but it’s easy to forget who is actually on those runways.  It is all too common for designers to use tweens and teens to model their clothes, since I’m guessing that an as-yet fully developed body has the right structure to show off their designs.  Let’s pause for a moment and ponder the wrongness of that.

We’ve come a long way since the 80’s supermodels such as Naomi Campbell and Cindy Crawford, both of whom were grown women in their heyday, and sported very curvy bodies (at least as far as the fashion world is concerned, not the real one, which is a story for another time).  But for some reason designers abandoned that look and now push a much more emaciated looking model as perfection.

Take this statement from my new fave model, Coco Rocha, which reads in part:

But this issue of model’s weight is, and always has been, of concern to me. There are certain moral decisions which seem like no brainers to us. For example, not employing children in sweatshops, and not increasing the addictiveness of cigarettes. When designers, stylists or agents push children to take measures that lead to anorexia or other health problems in order to remain in the business, they are asking the public to ignore their moral conscience in favor of the art.

Surely, we all see how morally wrong it is for an adult to convince an already thin 15 year old that she is actually too fat. It is unforgivable that an adult should demand that the girl unnaturally lose the weight vital to keep her body functioning properly. How can any person justify an aesthetic that reduces a woman or child to an emaciated skeleton? Is it art? Surely fashion’s aesthetic should enhance and beautify the human form, not destroy it.

 

Her entire statement is wonderfully written, and worth reading in its entirety.

As always, the consumer is the one with the power of the pocketbook, and it should be up to us to swing the pendulum back in the proper direction.  Because teenagers are not the ones buying these clothes, even though they have been deemed the proper vessels to showcase them.

It seems that Suri has a smaller version of her mother’s Ferragamo “Sofia” bag, which retails for around $850.

Now picture Glinda in the baby aisle at Target, wrestling with the decision to buy some five dollar barettes for the Munchkinette’s long (her bangs are in her eyes!) and unruly hair.

Obviously, Katie and I reside in two very different worlds.

But for what it’s worth, I have some advice for fellow mom Katie Holmes. This is advice I learned about the hard way, although not with something as expensive as that purse. However, the lesson is the same.

Never trust a preschooler with anything worth over twenty bucks.

The more expensive an item is, the more likely it will be dropped in the mud/given to the dog/ripped/lost.

Something like a rock they found at the park, though, will be treasured beyond measure.

Yes, there is yet another wave of products on the ever-increasing baby market that claim to make your child smarter, even in utero!

They are being dubbed “womb boxes” and for some strange reason, parents are falling into the trap of technology=better. Some are beaming in classical music, while others like Sheila and Ian Savage simply feel that their voices are “too muffled” for the baby to hear them without amplification.

Say what?

There is one parent quoted in the article who piped Mozart to her unborn sons, and they wound up becoming successful professional musicians.  But the article also states that the father is a professional musician as well, so I’m guessing it’s not a stretch that there is musical talent running in the family, regardless of their appreciation of Eine Kleine Nachtmusik at 30 weeks gestation.

Actually, there is a quote from a physician that perfectly expresses how I feel:

“This could be a hindrance to a baby’s sleep cycle,” says Dr. David Cabbad, a pediatrician at the Brooklyn Hospital Center.

“Why don’t we just let the baby develop normally in utero? Let him hear the father screaming at the mother, the TV, the phone ringing, and then when he gets out let him deal with that. It’s not natural. They’re in a womb, a protected atmosphere. Now you’re going to give them outside interference? Why don’t we give them a cellphone, too?”

If you haven’t heard, there is currently a huge kerfluffle going on about a Friend of Teeny Manolo, Tavi Gevinson. My esteemed colleague raincoaster wrote about Tavi’s fantastic blog long before Tavi was sitting in the front row of couture shows in New York and Paris. And writing for Harper’s Bazaar, and being on the covers of magazines and being BFF’s with the women behind Rodarte.

Which, by the way,  has apparently gotten some fashion insiders quite annoyed.

And hey, I suppose that is their right to get annoyed at things.  I get annoyed all the time, I totally understand.

However, instead of taking the, ahem, adult high road and demurring politely when asked about the thirteen year old blogger, they are instead swinging for the bleachers.

Perhaps they are thinking that if Tavi wants to “play in the big leagues” she should be ready to take some criticism, and to some degree, that is true.  But they also need to take into account that no matter how mature she seems, she is still a thirteen year old.  And they are grown women. There is a difference between being candid and just being cruel, and it seems they have no problems being rather harsh about a teenager whom they see as their rival. 

One even had the temerity to criticiz Tavi’s father:

Why wasn’t Tavi at school?

At the Dior show, trying to fight my way backstage to get a quote from John Galliano, I nearly fell over a tiny, grey-haired woman who, from the back, I took to be a septuagenarian Japanese fashion fanatic, as she was dressed head-to-toe in Comme des Garçons. When she was ushered into the inner sanctum before me, and turned around, I saw, with a sick lurch, that it was actually Tavi Gevinson, the 14-year-old fashion blogger from Chicago. She was being shadowed by her father, an English teacher, and has recently dyed her hair the trendiest colour.

As a mother of a 14-year-old, my first thought was,“Hang on, isn’t it term-time in America, too?”. Had I not been so busy trying to attract Galliano’s attention, I would have asked Mr Gevinson why he thought it was right to take his daughter out of school to go to haute couture shows, where she would be treated like a celebrity by paparazzi? Or why he thought it OK for her to model for Pop and Love magazines last year?…

…It’s all happening too fast for Tavi, and I wonder if her father knows how to protect her from it. I hope she’s got her nose to the grindstone, catching up with missed lessons this week, but it’s hard to imagine a kid being able to come back down to reality after that.

I’m sorry, but there are some things that are possibly once-in-a-lifetime opportunities, and traveling to France to meet John Galliano would seem to qualify as one of them.  I would have no issues  taking my own son out for something even less exciting than that.  The quote above speaks as sour grapes masquerading as “motherly” concern to me. 

I think that Tavi is a wonderful writer, and her appeal to both the general public and the fashion world is undeniable.  Perhaps she may not always have the spotlight shining on her as brightly as it does at this moment.  Perhaps she will lose interest in the fasion world and its denizens and move her considerable talents on to something else.

But, she’ll always have Paris.

Happy Monday! Er, wait, is there such a thing?

Well, my pathetic attempt to have the internet decide if I should cut my hair was all for naught, as a full fifty percent of you claimed that the length of hair all depended on the person. Boo! Why must you be such a pragmatic bunch? Forty three percent said that as long as the hair was in good shape, it is all good. I spend enough money I my hair, it had better be in good shape. A refreshing five percent of you had a strong opinion and voted that after thirty or so, the hair should be shorter.  So great, my hair appointment is Friday and I have no idea what I’m going to do.  That’s what I get for being wishy-washy.

Today I’ve got a question regarding a couple who were arrested for giving their children homemade tattoos. The children ranged in age from ten to seventeen.

That’s the question Details magazine wants to know, and it seems that in most cases, it’s the parents.

Well, actually the title is “Are You Raising a Douchebag?”  According to the article, your child might be a douchebag if he labels his friend’s birthday party as lame, is the one in charge of picking the weekend brunch spot, and “asks how the branzino is prepared.”

But what it all boils down to is basically parenting, or lack thereof.  The magazine points out the recent trend of wanting to be your kid’s friend rather than their actual parent. 

I don’t understand parents like that, to be honest.  I’ve got plenty of friends my own age, I don’t need my kid to be one.  And more importantly, he doesn’t need a 38 year old “friend” either.   I know someone who was so attatched to her mom that she wanted her mother to accompany her on her honeymoon cruise.  That, my friends, is just all kinds of wrong.

What I want to know is, do the parents who are raising douchebag kids really know that they are raising douchebag kids?  My guess is that they are too involved in their own little worlds to acknowledge the all-around douchebaggery of their family.

Because let’s face it, parents who are truly cool don’t raise douchebag kids.  Being a truly cool parent has nothing to do with your Bugaboo stroller and everything to do with how you teach your strong morals and ethics to your kids, hopefully by example. 

However, as an example used in the article, I totally cop to wanting my son to appreciate Roxy Music as much as I do. 

If that makes me a fractionally douchebag parent, then my apologies in advance.

From the looks of last week’s poll, the majority of you are fine with a pregnant woman having an alcoholic drink, with sixty percent saying alcohol is fine, but has to have a limit.  Twenty two percent disapproved of any alcohol at all being consumed by a pregnant woman.

I think it is interesting to note that it has only been recently that recommendations against alcohol consumption pregnancy have surfaced.  For decades women drank wine and beer, and probably other stuff, and our society seems to have not collapsed.  I think an occasional drink is fine, and a woman should not be vilified if she imbibes in a responsible manner.

Today’s poll is about an incident that ocurred in Calabasas, California on November 20.  It seems that a Facebook group, taking a joke from South Park a tad bit too literally, promoted the beating of red-haired people as “Kick a Ginger Day.”  As a result, a 12 year old was attacked by a group of fellow middle-school students and beaten.