28 thoughts on “Best thing to come out of Redmond in years…”

  1. Thank GOD!!!

    I’m sick and tired of 13 year olds dressed up like 18 year old hookers…

    Talk about embarasing when yer chatting up a cute young thing, and you find out she’s not even outta Jr High…

    GOD it’s embarassing…

    Not that I know from experiance, mind you…

    No, not at all…

    1. Re: Thank GOD!!!

      Yep, I know.

      Uh, I mean, no, I don’t know at all. Nope nope, not at all. No experience at all. Nope …

  2. As the mother of an 11 1/2 year old (can’t forget that half at this age), this is the best thing I’ve heard in a while. It’s pretty much impossible to get clothing that looks decent – my daughter is going into more goth-type styles because the ones she favors tend to cover more!

  3. This is a very good social trend, and I hope it continues and gets a good hold on our society for a couple of decades.

    Cultures go in cycles. Hem lines go up, and hem lines come down. When the cycles stop, it’s a sign of a culture that is on the road to collapse.

    I like to see cycles.

  5. Yay!!! I hate going shopping for my daughters because I can’t find little girl clothes just cut down adult clothes. Or that’s what it seems like to me.
    (But that girl so needs to a remedial course in basic English spelling.)

  6. Weirdest idea in business, evar: listening to the public instead of Marketing? Madness!

    What will become of all the sociology majors?

    1. Actually, marketing’s a seperate ‘discipline’ in itself, as it were – sociologists merely observe the trend, rather than seek to shape it. It’s the psychologists who’d want to fiddle with things, to try and see what effect it’d have on the phemonenon. 😀

  7. After embarassments like Britney Spears and half the pop ‘stars’ out there, I suspected there’d be a backlash someday, especially with the way the music industry’s marketing these girls.

    Nice to see one of their target demographic leading the way out of the madness. Now if only they’d also ditch Britney and every other one of those undertalented, overhyped, overexposed, and underdressed mounds of silicone they call ‘singers’, then we’re getting somewhere.

  8. I’m just amused that while there is an uproar over a partially exposed breast shown at the superbowl halftime show, Braveheart only has the sex scene censored…. That’s right, they show people’s legs and heads getting chopped off.
    This society has things backwards, we should be more comfortable with our bodies and physicality, and less comfortable with violence.
    That said, teenagers dressing a bit more conservatively is not something I mind, cause I happen to be a huge fan of the librarian look. And if it makes parents more comfortable, well that can’t be bad either.

    1. Extension into colloquial culture

      The disconnect between televised violence taboo and televised nudity/sex taboo stems in part from this:

      We as a society don’t believe that our violent entertainment will make us more violent as individuals.
      We DO believe that nudity and sexuality in our entertainment will make us more sexually promiscuous as individuals.

      It is pretty easy to trend cultural promiscuity (hemlines) as a follow-on to promiscuity in entertainment. We’ve looked at it for years, and know that it happens. Note that I’m not assigning a relative moral value to promiscuity here — I’m just saying that we know our entertainment affects it directly.

      Studies also show that cultural violence follows violence in entertainment, but that has not been accepted in the mainstream yet. Have a look at On Killing: the Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society by Lt. Col. David Grossman. This quote from Library Journal sums the book up nicely:


      Grossman (psychology, West Point) presents three important hypotheses: 1) That humans possess the reluctance to kill their own kind; 2) that this reluctance can be systematically broken down by use of standard conditioning techniques; and 3) that the reaction of "normal" (e.g., non-psychopathic) soliders to having killed in close combat can be best understood as a series of "stages" similar to the ubiquitous Kubler-Ross stages of reaction to life-threatening disease. While some of the evidence to support his theories have been previously presented by military historians (most notably, John Keegan), this systematic examination of the individual soldier's behavior, like all good scientific theory making, leads to a series of useful explanations for a variety of phenomena, such as the high rate of post traumatic stress disorders among Vietnam veterans, why the rate of aggravated assault continues to climb, and why civilian populations that have endured heavy bombing in warfare do not have high incidents of mental illness.

      My point… you’re right, the disconnect is absurd, and oddly ironic, but it does not follow that the balancing the equation with more promiscuous entertainment is the right answer.

      –Howard

      1. Re: Extension into colloquial culture

        Oh, we don’t need to balance the equation by making there be as overwhelming promiscuity as there is violence, my point was more that we should BALANCE these two things. Less violence, a bit more comfort with the human body. The other thing is that a breast isn’t inherently sexual, but grinding against each other is. View videos with lots of grinding more strictly than movies with some artful shots of the unclothed body. I mean c’mon.

    1. Well, she did once dress like a Catholic school girl and say she’d be saving herself for marriage…

      We all know where that went. 😉

      1. Yes, but now she’s going to have to figure out how to be a grown-up without flaunting herself sexually. That will be a whole new set of skills for her. She’ll either manage it, or she’ll be a has-been.

        Or maybe she’ll figure out there is something more to life than fame.

        1. *Gasp!* Blasphemy!

          Though I’m not sure which would be the worse count to that mindset: someone like Britney actually needing to master skills (“Aren’t looks enough?”), or that there could be anything more to life than fame.

  10. Yay! sluttiness begone!

    I just graduated from university (see my LJ, it’s all I’ve been talking about for at least 2 weeks), and as a mature student (28, when the average is 20), I’ve been singularly horrified by some of the clothing my peers have worn. And some of the stories of how much maintenance of self is involved in wearing those clothes.
    My particular peeve is the ‘low-rise’ jean. I guess maybe I’ve been desensitized to the breasts, since everyone now has cleavage, thanks to water bras and jelly thingers you stick into your water bra, but when did our society decay so far that “ass-cleavage” was acceptable??
    You know, I don’t wanna see my classmates thong panties, and even less do I want to see the other parts that hang out of the top of jeans…

    I’m glad a kid is standing up to it. I lead girl guides (in Canada), and most of my girls dress really modestly, but all of them complain that they have a hard time finding clothes to fit appropriately. Perhaps we adults are too overwhelmed, or desensitized to it, but it seems somehow appropriate – “and a child shall lead them”

    my $0.02 (currently worth 0.0146868 USD)

    1. spelling

      me again – I lead Girl Guides in Canada (ages 9-11) and honestly, her spelling isn’t nearly as atrocious as some of theirs. I don’t entirely know what’s going on in schools, but spelling certainly isn’t it.

      One of my girls is a straight A student, and I’ve spelling checked her papers… Kinda frightening. “But Guider Joanna, I have a spell check on my computer.” “Kelsey, so far it’s missed 35 words.”

      *shrug*

      maybe I’ll give spelling tests as a disciplinary action next year 😉

      1. Re: spelling

        spellcheckers are wonderful…but one needs to proofread as well. Just because a word is correctly spelt for a different meaning….

        *sighs*
        me the spelling Nazi.

    2. Why was the spelling even in the article?

      I have to wonder why her bad spelling was even in the article. It’s ALMOST as if the reporter who wrote the article was subtly trying to discredit her, or make her look “noble but dumb.”

      Then again, maybe the reporter thinks that it makes Nordstroms look foolish for being called back into the right market by someone who does not spell well.

      It bugged me that it was in the article, that’s all I’m saying.

      –Howard

      1. Re: Why was the spelling even in the article?

        Could be, or it might be to deflect any charge that her letter had been altered in any way to make it more palatable.

        I may (?!) be over sensitive to spelling and English usage. My sister is a primary school teacher, and when I contrast her pupils with my contemporaries when at that age….I’ll grant you that they seem happier, I hated my time at primary school. Hated it.

  12. As the father of a 9-year-old daughter, I’m quite pleased that we’ll probably see more choice in clothing styles soon. I have no objection to low-cut pants and high-cut shirts–as long as they’re being worn by people over the age of 18, thank you very much. It’s when the seductive clothing starts being made in sizes intended for ten-year-olds that I get really icked out.

    Then again, I consider “child beauty pageants” to be one step up (if that) from legitimized pedophilia, so perhaps I’m a bit more extreme than most on this issue. But darnit, let kids be kids! They’ll be teenagers, with all of the rioting hormones and psychosexual misery that that entails, plenty soon enough.

  13. Feeling Smug

    I just got home from shopping. Kiki needed summer clothes, specifically shorts. I went to two stores and the ONLY shorts that were available could only be appropriate as underwear rather than as outerwear. I had an “aha” moment and imediately steered my cart into the BOYS section. There I found some comfy cotton knit shorts that actually serve to cover her body. I brought them home to Kiki and she was delighted. The only problem left is deciding whether or not to tell her where I got them.

      1. Re: Feeling Smug

        No fly involved. These are elastic waisted pants.

        I fessed up to Kiki about where I found the pants. She thought it was really cool and has decided that I’m a smart mommy.

        1. Re: Feeling Smug

          Of course, in five years she’s going to be convinced you are the most dense adult in the world. Enjoy it while you can 🙂

          Not being a mommy, I hadn’t realized that the slutty-clothes trend had become so prevalent you weren’t able to find non-revealing clothes. That’s pretty bad.

          1. Re: Feeling Smug

            I’ve been shopping for Goose’s clothes in the boys’s section for the past 4 years now. It’s insane. What’s really horrible is when the 9 year old’s tank top makes an acceptable tank top for the 4 year old and their grandmother bought the top because it is “stylish”. GAH.

            When we can afford it I’m going to buy a good sewing machine and take sewing lessons.

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