Anyone who's talked to a little girl for more than 30 seconds knows that little girls are weird. They're weird and gross and random and curious and raunchy, and I mean all of that in the most complimentary way. Get a little girl talking, or listen in on a little girl playdate, and you'll hear fart jokes and science experiments and ghost stories and plans for world domination. Sure, the topic of princesses might come up, but you'd be surprised how many of those make-believe princesses are skateboard enthusiasts who moonlight as crime-fighting paleontologists. Like I said, little girls are weird.
And yet . . . if you take a stroll through the aisles of the little girls' clothing section at most stores, you won't find any evidence of that wonderful, diverse weirdness. You'll find a lot of pink, a lot of sequins, a lot of princesses, and a lot of cupcakes. Now don't get me wrong: Princesses and cupcakes are great, but they represent a pretty thin sliver of the varied interests of actual girls.
That's where a new clothing company called Princess Awesome comes in. The business was started by two moms from the Bay Area who were frustrated by the lack of selection in the girls' clothing market.
"We believe that if a girl likes purple and also likes trucks, she should be able to wear a purple truck dress," the founders explain on their Kickstarter page. "And if a girl likes princesses and also aliens, then an alien princess skirt is for her."
The duo, Rebecca Melsky and Eva St. Clair, created a test batch of dresses in St. Clair's basement in 2013. Their fabric patterns featured trucks, dinosaurs, periodic elements, pirates, and the pi symbol, which became their most popular design. The entire collection of dresses sold out within weeks, and Melsky and St. Clair knew they were onto something big.
Hoping to expand the the Princess Awesome brand and streamline production, they launched a Kickstarter to raise money, setting a goal of $35,000. They've already brought in pledges totaling more than $92,000, with nearly three weeks left until their deadline. The money raised on Kickstarter will be used to fund the production of 1,000 dresses and give the company a "solid financial footing to continue making awesome clothes for awesome girls well into the future." How—ahem—awesome is that?
It's great to see companies like Princess Awesome and GoldieBlox disrupting the pink-saturated status quo of the girls' clothing and toy markets, and finding such success in the process. I'm really hoping to see a similar effort to fill the voids on the boys' side of the aisle, too. Because for every girl who wants to rock a pirate dress, there's a boy who would love to wear a princess T-shirt or sparkly cupcake PJs.
Ideally, as a culture we'll continue to push back against the strict gender divisions that cause these problems in the first place, and let kids wear—and play with—whatever weird, wonderful things interest them. Princesses, pirates, and fart jokes included.
