Asda launches gender-neutral children’s clothing range

@CurlewKate Yes good point. I loved the old Frugi style bright clothes for kids but can’t justify Frugi prices for everything and the quality isn’t quite as good anymore, I hear. Sonshine magazine made a great post this month about why florals for boys are great.

Tu from sainsburys used to be great for bright unisex but now it’s back to the sludge again. Surely one of the big supermarket brands could make a killing with a range of fun, non gendered clothes.

I was doing a bit of online shopping earlier this evening, and came across this as the drop-down menu under 'gender' on one website. I think it's just a mistake but one never knows, does one?😁

BY GENDER

• baby boy
• adult
• horse
• pony
• dog
• kids

"Its all pink and purple saccharine sweetness for the girls. Grey/blue dinosaur sludge for the boys."

I agree that's awful. However now it's all grey/blue sludge for both sexes. Still no pink/purple flowers for boys.

Love it, the clothes look great.
My kids don’t go for pink or blue. I think Asda got it wrong last season. It was dreary.

what i would love though is more "girly" clothes in non-pink shades - I want frilly green, blue and neutral clothing with cute "girly" images and little bow

nothing against pink, I like pink, but my baby looks like a sick victorian child in most shades of pink

it's a bit of a non-issue, gender neutral clothing always existed, especially for babies

but hey, it got the attention

I welcome this! Kids clothes are so much more gendered than in the 90s when I was growing up.

Its all pink and purple saccharine sweetness for the girls. Grey/blue dinosaur sludge for the boys.

My midwife today expressed surprise I didn’t ask to find out the sex of the baby. Most people do now, she said, because they like to be organised. I think by ‘organised’ she really means people like to gender stereotype. What’s organisation got to do with a baby’s sex? Nothing!

All baby clothes should be gender neutral as far as I’m concerned. Bravo Asda.

They look like perfectly normal clothes for small children.

Give over.

Boys clothes are practical, comfortable and withstand alls sorts of activities.

Girls clothes are generally less so.

So there can be different functions built in with the clothes. A girl choosing boys’ clothes could have a different reason for that choice from a boy choosing girls’.

But I agree that if there were say corduroy trousers -one pair plain or with dinosaurs, and another, the same cloth, shape and durability but printed with flowers - society might see it more acceptable to wear the former; less acceptable for a boy to wear the latter.
Similarly that would apply with for example, a grey, navy, or red tracksuit, and a shocking pink one.

My fear is that you have to watch out these days too incase a little boy with long hair and a taste for ‘beautiful’ things gets the suggestion he may be transgender whispered in his ear.

At least the 1960s and ‘Flower Power’
reintroduced flowery shirts for men without any necessarily gay or trans label attached.

And as I said before MN and people would probably go crazy and see it as some kind of trans agenda if they came out with pink skirts and frills for boys. When actually I think it puts paid to the idea that you have to change gender to wear whatever you want

As I said earlier, unisex and gender neutral means traditional boys things that girls are "allowed" to wear. Never traditional girls things for boys. It's so depressing.

He has positioned himself as the Go-To Mr Reasonable on all topics 'gender'.

He gets off on wearing gendered clothes, so why he is now an expert on 'non-gendered' clothing is a mystery.

AGP = the new leper.
Yes he's a self confessed AGP but he's also a parent, and a teacher.

Is he not allowed to have or express a view?

How very free speech.

Unisex clothing for babies/toddlers is a lot more recent than Victorian in the UK. My twin cousins - boy /girl born between the Wars, wore identical dresses.

In France toddler boys were wearing dresses in the 1950/60s. And, you still buy pink dragees (sugared almonds )for boys, blue for girls.

The cost of fabric and labour meant the Victorians thought it was entirely proper to hand down baby clothes to the next child. Obviously many Victorian women handsewed all their baby garments themselves without paying a seamstress to do it, but they certainly wouldn't have valued their own time at zero. Once you've made a garment, you want as many uses out of it as possible. So the little gowns were made to be unisex.

Today's rigid colour-coding of baby clothes is only possible due to the technological developments that made mass-production of clothes possible. It's all down to baby-clothes manufacturers, who want us buying pink sleepsuits for girls and then feeling obliged to buy an entirely new set of sleepsuits for the next baby, because that one's a boy. There's no other time in history that people could have afforded to think that they needed to buy an entirely new wardrobe for a three-month-old boy, instead of using the stuff bought for his older sister 18 months ago.

Surely the whole girls = pink, boys = blue thing is another example of adult neuroses? It only started from the Victorian age or something.

I agree that it's all down to adults, but the fascinating thing is that it actually switched! Pink used to be seen as a masculine color, being a lighter version of red, while the calmer blue was for girls. Imagery of the Virgin Mary usually has her in blue.

“There has been a great diversity of opinion on the subject, but the generally accepted rule is pink for the boy and blue for the girl. The reason is that pink being a more decided and stronger color is more suitable for the boy, while blue, which is more delicate and dainty, is prettier for the girl.” - Ladies Home Journal, 1918

The Victorians did have a lot of rigid sex stereotypes but even they didn't impose them on infants, who used to all be dressed in neutral baby frocks for the first few years. Much easier than trousers for toileting! These look 'feminine' to the modern eye but weren't considered so at the time.

Knowing all this makes it particularly hilarious for me when I read nonsensical hot takes like 'women naturally love pink because cavewomen gathered pink berries'.

20+ years ago I was buying clothes in a mix of colours for all my children. Of all the places to buy cheap clothes Asda was the one that only sold things with stupid slogans about being a princess or a dinosaur hunter, and all their waistbands were too big for my DC anyway.
So for them to claim some kind of high ground for selling stuff that all the kids can wear is a bit cheeky, to be honest. I wonder if they have started doing a few with adjustable waistband elastic?

@Skiphopbump Yes! Agreed
Frugi was another (organic) brand all three of mine loved that offered gender-neutral (my 3 yo still loves Frugi, but not quite my 13 and 16 yo's so much any more!!) 😆

DS is nearly 16, he wore lots of unisex clothing from shops such as https://www.polarnopyret.co.uk/
Green baby and various Scandinavian brands I found I TK Maxx. They were mainly bright, colourful and comfortable clothing.
Gender neutral / unisex clothing for little ones isn’t new.

And instead of "gender-neutral" clothes being beige etc...just let your kids wear what they like?!!! My 3 yo little girl wears tops with dinosaurs on some days, other days sparkly love hearts! She chooses!

No they have good marketing... It'll sell.

There have been unisex ranges out for years, just not under the banner of "diversity" or "gender-neutral."
My sons (now 16 and 14) were both often dressed head-to-toe in the Little Bird range by Jools Oliver at Mothercare (I love all things with a retro vibe!) I remember my middle child when he was about three rocking the cutest ever pair of bright purple trousers! So cute!!
He still loves loud clothes ❤️