There’s an article in this month’s W called Underage Fashion. It’s a discussion about tweens and couture, and brings up an issue we’ve considered before.
If you’re wearing Chanel couture at 15, (Emma Watson this summer), what do you have to look forward to?
W agrees with us; the article acknowledges how inappropriate it is to wear thousands of dollars worth of designer clothes at such a young age.
But most of the designers and stylists they interviewed don’t see a problem. Marc Jacobs discussed his line’s recent face, 13-year old Dakota Fanning: “(She) really just fits into our approach to advertising, which is that we’re not selling anything. This wasn’t aspirational. You didn’t want to be Dakota Fanning. It was an opportunity to have an intimate moment with somebody I admire.”
Really Marc?
Because as a teenager, we devoured the pages of Vogue, (and yes, Seventeen), and we always wanted to be the girls in the ads. And if those girls had been our age, we would have identified with the clothes that much more. We might have even felt like we had a right to that $2000 bag. Not to mention your ads are very aspirational; we’d love to look as cool as the Marc girls (and in one of those ads, Dakota looked about 20).
We splurged on a Philip Lim dress last year and Miu Miu flats this Fall, but we don’t have a Chanel bag yet. For us, that’s half the fun – looking forward to a great purchase, and earning it.
Obviously, we’re not movie stars.
But considering what happens when child actresses try to blow up too quickly, if we were a young celeb, we might pace our red carpet outfits, too.
–BRITT ABOUTALEB