KATHMANDU, NEPAL – Thamel, the touristic hub of Nepal’s capital, Kathmandu, has its own quirky charm. On one side of the street, branded clothes are on display at a shopping center. On the other side, Read the rest of this entry »

Leading figures from industries including fashion and beauty are helping a nationwide campaign to tackle youth unemployment, with the aim of creating products which will raise money for charity.

The Read the rest of this entry »

MANILA, Philippines — As the Filipino middle-class expands more rapidly in the coming years, one of the sunrise industries catering to the domestic market is that of fashion. Filipino fashion designers Read the rest of this entry »

Young women are eight times more likely to develop skin cancer today than they were 40 years ago — and young men are four times as likely to battle the disease, according to a study from Mayo Clinic Read the rest of this entry »

Time and time again, youths in our community and around the world have shown the power they have to create positive change in our world.

In our community, there are youths setting out to identify and Read the rest of this entry »

For years now, teens in Tokyo’s fashionable Harajuku have been pushing the envelope with their Gothic Lolita outfits. Many young Japanese are fashion conscious, but cliques in Harajuku excel at wearing Read the rest of this entry »

Pham Dang Anh Thu has developed her own label – Joli Poli – which has recently gained popularity among teenagers in the domestic market. Thu’s unique arrangements show creativity and personal touches. Read the rest of this entry »

Today’s made-for-outrage New York Times trend story is a doozy: Little girls are wearing fancy, expensive clothes made by fashion designers who make fancy, expensive clothes for little girls now. Little girls! First world problems, yes, but that doesn’t mean people aren’t mad. On several levels, too!

Stepping back, however, note that couture for kids has been around for more than half a century. Cathy Horyn writes of American couturier Charles James introducing his first kid line to a group of editors in 1956. In the old days, “it was a tough business, filled with manufacturers with names like Cute Togs and Bo-peep trying to strain a profit from a yard of seersucker.” (And, perhaps, less of an overall cultural obsession with youth?) Flash forward to today:

Why the boom?

The most obvious reason is one of money, even as Horyn writes that “the reality is that designer wear is still a garnish for the $32 billion children’s apparel industry.” (It’s a tasty garnish, apparently.) But this tracks with what we know of merchandizing more generally: Children, tweens, and teens are a huge business, and if parents are willing to pay, why not expand your clothing line to take advantage of that? Even if it’s a small portion of the business, we’re talking a lot of money. Check the Lanvin site—note that kid’s clothes are under the category of “petite”—there are ballet flats for $300 and almost $400; a dress that costs $2,000; a skirt for nearly $1,000. Grown up women who write for websites like The Atlantic Wire wouldn’t pay these prices for adult lady clothes. Yet some parents, apparently, do (designers wouldn’t be making these lines if they didn’t sell) though others consider the prices too high and the products “dreadful”: “I find $300 kids’ outfits disgusting. To each their own,” said one commenter on the UrbanBaby blog.

“Disgusting” brings us to the next point, that thing we hear when we talk about shows like Toddlers and Tiaras, and it’s two-pronged. One, should little girls be growing up so very fast? And two, when little girls are dressed in the clothes of grown-up women—whether that means in Daisy Duke short-shorts and cowboy boots or Suri Cruise’s high heels and lipstick or a $1,600 Lanvin coat—are they being sexualized? Further, if we are sexualizing children by dressing them in pricey clothes that aren’t even right for their actual bodies but for bodies much older (and post-pubescent, aka, sexualized), isn’t that wrong? Look at the photos in the Times article of our young model. She’s probably something like 4 years old, yet she’s imitating the slouchy posture and “I defy you to come hither” stare of a much older woman in the fashion business. It is a bit disconcerting. At the same time, our culture has a very weird preoccupation with not only youth but also with not “aging” kids who should be youthful—there’s a standard visceral horrified reaction to kids looking like grownups, and it has to do with a fear of pedophilia, and possibly, our own fears about aging, among other things. The “mutton dressed as lamb” concept, a sexist statement about a woman wearing clothes “inappropriate for her age,” here gets turned on its head. We’re dressing tiny baby lambs like the proverbial mutton. People are not OK with that.

At the beginning of Girl Model, a documentary about the ugly side of beauty, a bunch of skinny young girls in a Siberian town stand around in bikinis, waiting to be judged. Awkward and gawky, hands folded modestly over their thin chests, they’re called one by one to stand in front of a couple of representatives from a modelling agency. “I feel that her hips are too big,” one of them says about a teenager, casually destroying one dream of glory.

Some of the girls are chosen, though. Nadya Vall, a pretty, boyish 13-year-old, is her family’s hope for the future: If she can be a model, her father can afford to subdivide the bedroom in the family home so his children can all sleep there. “My friends and relatives say I look like a model,” says Nadya with adolescent optimism.

Her wish is about to come true. A woman named Ashley Arbaugh, herself a former child model, is a scout for a Japanese modelling agency. The girls she picks must be not too tall, must be cute and, most especially, must be young. “Young is very important,” Arbaugh says; later, she will add that they can’t be too young, and Nadya’s look, which is practically prepubescent, makes her a natural.

So Nadya flies to Tokyo for her big break. There, she will be forgotten at the airport, housed in a tiny rundown apartment with a roommate, and taken around to various talent agencies by a man who tells her to say she is 15. She’s rejected many times; when she does get work, she isn’t paid for it. Her contract says that, if she gains one centimetre on her waist, hips or bust, she can be fired. She cries, and wants to go home.

Girl Model is a sad story with frightening undercurrents. Filmed without commentary by co-directors David Redmon and Ashley Sabin, it comprises a bare-bones portrait of the bare-bones children who are found, used, and often discarded in what Arbaugh acknowledges is a tough business.

There’s more than that, though lurking, just under surface. The head of the Japanese agency, for instance, is a man who “loves models,” a characterization that is allowed to lie there, an unexploded time bomb. Girl Model makes no accusations, but its drive-by portrait of exploitation is haunting.

If Nadya is the tragic heroine of Girl Model, Arbaugh is the conflicted narrator. Seemingly tormented, she lives in a cold modernistic house in Connecticut, where she keeps two dolls on the bed: her children, she says, more so than the little girls she recruits in Russia.

Arbaugh has videos of herself as a young model, when her pouty indifference came from an actual hatred of the profession and all it stood for. “It really has no weight,” she says. “It’s based on nothing.” And yet, she continues to find young girls: The world of fashion is an addiction, and her ambivalence reflects the wider culture – of youth, of beauty, of corruptible innocence – that sustains the industry.

Another model named Rachel tries to assign the blame for what happens to the girls who get lost in it: Is it the girls and their ambitions, or the agencies, or the magazines, or us? “There is no one to blame,” she says, “but the whole thing is so wrong.”

Source: http://www.canada.com/entertainment/thin+young/6531417/story.html