I’m at a bit of a loss as to what’s going on in the heads of people who design baby clothes. I’ll be the first to applaud creativity and diversity in available products, mind you, but many of the choices I see here add no aesthetic value I can find, while being wholly impractical and/or completely mad! I can certainly understand where out of pure artistic élan, some closures would have two snaps versus three, or locations would differ from garment to garment, or maybe one would use straps where another used velcro, etc. However, there’s a difference between being creative and making stupid design choices!
Stupid choice #1:
Why does virtually every sleep suit come with a zipper that continues past the crotch and down one leg? It doesn’t make getting that one leg in any easier (in fact, if your baby likes to kick, I’ve discovered, it makes things much harder!), and even if it did, you’d still have to deal with the other leg. As far as I can tell, the sole purposes of this design choice are a) to make getting the thing on a squirmy baby significantly harder and b) to include lots more metal to imprint my baby’s skin when he gets himself twisted up in it!
Stupid Choice #2:
Why are the feet on footie pants and onesies rotated ninety degrees to the outside? are there a lot of babies being born with feet that point straight out away from each other? Have I lived my entire life, never once noticing that the majority of babies are designed to walk like Charlie Chaplin, or a ballet dancer retired after a horrifying over-turn-out incident? On my child, at least, this design means that to get his foot all the way into a leg, you have to push it on as far as it will go, then with one hand pin your child’s limb down while he struggles, with the other hand twist the pant leg 120 degrees inside, and with the third hand, jerk it quickly down over the foot before it can unwind too much.
Stupid Choice #3:
What idiot decided that all baby clothes that open in front should have open necklines? Babies wiggle. They twist. They pull on things. Which of these traits seems compatible with a neckline that easily allows at least one shoulder, and often both, to be squeezed through it? Did the baby-fashion industry get together one afternoon and decide that clearly, the ‘Flashdance’ look was the preferred style for all babies, and that anyone who disagreed was to be shunned by their secret society? I could understand pullover tops with wide necks, but no, those are so snug you have to nearly shear your baby’s ears off to get them on. No, it’s the open-in-front tops, the ones that would be quite easy to put on your child even if the neckline were a fraction of an inch larger circumferentially than your baby’s neck, that allow enough space that every time I turn around, my boy looks like an 80s cheerleader warming up for practice in one of those ridiculous neck-cut-out sweatshirts!
If I as an engineer made design choices this dumb, I’d have been pushed into management decades ago to prevent me from doing further harm!
UNRELATED: Random ridiculously cute baby pic to satisfy popular demand!
This shirt nearly took off my nose and ears, but I look awful cute, don’t I?
