The launch of Material Girl, the juniors' clothing line designed by Madonna and her 13-year-old daughter, Lourdes, has given New York magazine an excuse to pose a parent-baiting question on its cover
"Why do tweens dress like strippers?" It turns out that particular question isn't answered by the article it teases, nor is it clear that tweens are actually dressing like strippers. False advertising aside, though, the piece proposes a more interesting theory: That "our fetishization of youth" has created quite the sartorial paradox.
"Older women are dressing younger" and "young girls are dressing older," writes Alex Morris. The upshot is that "no one knows quite what to wear."
There is one stripper reference in the piece: "She can have the taste of a stripper, if I don't watch it," the mother of an 8-year-old laments. For the most part, though, it seems tweens are aspiring more to the edgy, mix-'n'-match, rock-'n'-roll look of Taylor Momsen, the face of Material Girl.
Morris describes watching an 11-year-old girl shopping with her father: She comes out of the dressing room "in skinny black jeans with a stripy tie-dyed pattern and a camisole printed with enough bubbly slogans to make Pollyanna claw out her eyes just for spite." Adorably, her dad goes, "
I don't think that goes together too well. It's a little wild for me." Then follows the daughter's apparent discomfort as she pulls at the clothes and her admission that, "yeah, I just realized it doesn't go so well."
