babywit.comBaby Gap announced that it would start carrying skinny jeans for the diaper set. Toddlers everywhere flocked to the nearest possible store and bought them in bulk (fearing a loaded nappy might cause unfashionable bulging and possible tearing).

Okay, so that didn't really happen. But parents are indeed talking about the mini skinny, the newest gimmick in toddler prêt a porter.

For just $29.50, your little one can rock the same style as your teenager, who's really just channeling your favorite rock gods of yesteryear. Nobody filled out a pair of skinny jeans quite like Mick or Ziggy Stardust, not even you in your pre-pregnancy Nirvana days. And that might explain why we continue to dress our toddlers the way we wish we could've dressed when we were that age.

Had it not been for my obsession with little orphan Annie, the pinafores forced upon me as a child would have been too great a humiliation for me to bear. The same goes for my sensible saddle oxfords, forest green knee socks, and plaid everything. I realize now that my mother was recycling her dormant fashion fantasies through me, her pint-sized mannequin. Indeed, her mini me. 

The mini skinny, what the Gap calls "our slimmest pair for your most stylish little guy" (meaning you must air out his privates frequently to avoid diaper rash), isn't the only revisionist fashion on the market today.

BabyWit.com offers a dizzying array of t-shirts, hoodies, and leisure suits for parents to unleash their sleeping hipster within. For the truly fashion forward, Moschino's toddler shoes, as they say, "reflect [a] distinctive irony and transgression." Sounds like a guy I used to date in Brooklyn.

Now that I'm a grounded and practical-minded mother, at $220 I can honestly say these sneakers are stupid. And yet ... if I were married to a Beckham, I just might bend. 

I have tattoos and a pierced nose, but I refuse -- absolutely refuse -- to be one of those hipster parents that subject their toddlers to mullets and faux hawks. Nevertheless, I must admit that one of my favorite mommy jobs is playing his pop-culture stylist.

Interestingly, though, while we experiment with the occasional graphic tee or "ironic" t-shirt, we're trending toward lots of lime green and, to the utter disgrace of my father, tights, shorts, and, yes, plaid in the wintertime. It's delightfully European, the little boy in tights thing. And his dad's of Scottish descent, hence my little guy looks great in a tartan. 

Actually, the more that I think about it, my son's style is decidedly a Technicolor take on my pinafore days. How very retro. You really do grow up to be your own mother. To borrow a line from Tropic Thunder: I'm the mini me, dressing the mini me, just like me when I was mini.

That being the case, I'm going to have to pass on the mini skinny -- along with the transgressive sneakers and $44 vintage tee. It's not my job to force him into a hipster awakening care of the Gap. In the meantime, I have my eye on some really cute knee socks.

What do you think of this fashion trend for toddlers?

 

Image via BabyWit.com