Baby Attack: The Charge of Four-Year-Old Designers with Moms in tow

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“Gira la moda” is the name of a very popular game from the 1980s and 1990s in which little girls used a series of concentric circles to choose faces, tops, skirts, trousers and accessories to pin on paper, thus building imaginary collections. Now that the expression has become synonymous with the turnover of designers and, following them, the transfer of styles from one brand to another, boys – more than girls, at least for now – play with fashion through very popular social profiles. The first baby designer with a reputation as a web star is Max Alexander , whose couture.to.the.max profile is followed first and foremost by his mother Sherri Madison , the cut-out artist: Max is presented as a natural prodigy who from the age of four, during the pandemic (he was born in Los Angeles in 2016), began to combine fabrics and ask how to sew them. From here the lessons with two seamstresses and then off to a first series of creations for a show in the garden of the house and then the celebrity with a look for Sharon Stone. Today Max, or rather his mother, announces a collaboration with Fern Mallis, the godmother of New York fashion, former director of the Council of Fashion Designers of America (CFDA), a training for which it is recommended to stay connected, “Stay tuned”. Without taking anything away from Max's aspirations and dreams (better if leaving out the part in which he proclaims himself the reincarnation of Guccio Gucci), it is clear that there was no need for this generation of child prodigies. The “wunderkind”, modeled after Wolfgang Amadé Mozart, is a further and unnecessary social topic of entertainment and distraction in a fashion storytelling that is increasingly veering towards the voice of “curiosity and custom”.

But since the allure of the budding genius is evidently an irresistible fuse for the media, Max has now been joined by Dylan (his last name is not known, to protect his privacy, although his mother, celebrity stylist Samantha McMillen, is known), eleven years old, founder of Dylan's T-shirt Club, a name that groups together hand-painted t-shirts given as gifts to a fan base of supporters that includes names like Pierpaolo Piccioli, Pharrell Williams and Elle Fanning, that is, his mother's customers. His profile recalls that "Dylan designed his first t-shirt in 2019", basically when other children learn to hold a pencil in their hand. The operation is currently non-profit, except for sporadic collaborations such as the one with the Woven store in Durham, UK. On the other hand, in all these cases, the exposure on social media is massive – Dylan is photographed among piles of t-shirts and says he dreams of collaborations with Supreme, Lego (he is still eleven years old) and Billie Eilish – and therefore the narrative of “spontaneous play” takes on a strident tone.

The designs on the t-shirts and the phrases with a bit of uncertain calligraphy are funny, naive, entertaining and tender for creativity free from patterns like the drawings of many other children: a very strong social trend has in fact been aiming for some time now at the translation (DIY or commercial) of childhood “scribbles” of monsters and animals into soft dolls. The child prodigy arouses curiosity and admiration (out of scale talents have always existed in the artistic and scientific fields) but here the game gives way to media coverage with a bitter aftertaste: despite the mothers' reassurances that their children are normal children who, in endless days or with the help of invisible staff, also find time to play with friends, study, play tennis and swim, read comics, run in the garden, even, who knows! skinning their knees, the impression is that of the construction of a future business or social content to be monetized: Max Alexander in the front row of a fashion show? Why not? after all, he's a little celebrity.

Sewing, like knitting and embroidery, are educational and fun manual activities for boys and girls, and only their equating to household chores has relegated them for many years to outdated activities when in reality picking up a needle is a pastime that can be transformed into a useful skill, and it is no coincidence that in many cities laboratories and ateliers for "little stylists" are starting to proliferate. The only shame is the label, "stylists", which makes one think of work dynamics and goes beyond the dimension of play to tickle the ambition for a successful career. In the interviews of Max and Dylan's mothers, words like innate talent, extraordinary ability, astonishing and obviously non-existent skills are wasted: Max Alexander's clothes are sincerely and objectively ugly, but it doesn't matter, in fact it's right this way, and playing outside of social media, without expectations, is more fun.

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