Fashion Bug Bites Early, but Cool 7-Year-Old Is Still Daddy’s Little Girl

In the wacky world of back-to-school fashion, the first thing you learn is that the ground is always shifting.

For example, bell-bottoms are back. Retailers are calling them something else these days--wide-leg jeans or flare-cut corduroys. But take my word for it, they are bell-bottoms. And my kid thinks they are cool.

I swear I can’t keep up. It feels strange on this day set aside for back-to-school shopping to be haunted by such a fashion flashback.

Still, I try to convince my daughter, Apple, that I know of such things, that my own wardrobe once bulged with bell-bottoms--all colors, all fabrics.

To help boost my story, I confide that I was the last person at my high school to give up on that style, that I held out until my bell-bottoms were hopelessly outdated and my classmates shamed me into straight-legged trousers.

She believes none of it.

Because she is 7 years old and going into the second grade, she now is a high priestess of fashion. She knows there was no fashion before her, and that none will follow.

And she lets me know she knows by rolling her eyes, the way only a 7-year-old high priestess can.

“Daaaad,” she says, stretching the word to emphasize her mild annoyance. “We’re supposed to be shopping.”

Right, we are. Along with thousands of other families, we are supposed to be elbowing through crowds and sifting through sales racks in search of back-to-school basics.

It is an age-old ritual, played out every year around this time. It’s a ritual that signals the end of summer and primes us for the start of the school year.

Let it be known that I consider this whole “back-to-school” movement backward. It’s not as if I’m an advocate of school uniforms. I’m just wary of the propaganda.

At the heart of my resistance is a deep-seated belief that retailers are trying to transform my one and only daughter, that they stand ready to push her closer to womanhood when she is only a little girl.

Take our first stop at a trendy Santa Barbara boutique, where the back-to-school offerings included a matching leopard-skin ensemble “for the animal in you.”

Animal in Apple? I don’t think so. Not my daughter, at least not any time soon.

It became immediately apparent that this was no ordinary shopping trip. Really, it was a fight to keep Apple from growing up too soon, from slipping over to the dark side where shopping is king and her father’s opinion carries little weight.

But in good faith, I carried on.

I had agreed to take Apple and her best friend, Daniela, anywhere they wanted for the day. I thought their needs would be radically different, seeing as how Daniela is moving to middle school while Apple continues her elementary school exploration.

Together, they planned stops at malls in Santa Barbara, Thousand Oaks and Costa Mesa, sifting through catalogs and newspaper ads to track down the best buys.

And together they were a retailer’s dream: a couple of kids with money to burn and a day to go crazy.

At one stop, they piled up an impressive collection. They found crop tops and jean shorts and baggy corduroy pants.

They added several styles of blue jeans and a pair of iridescent orange overalls, so bright they would put a Caltrans worker to shame.

“I’ve seen oranger,” Daniela said, declaring them cool.

“Yeah, cool,” Apple echoed, slowly drifting away.

You can learn a lot about your kid on such an excursion, maybe more than you want to know. I discovered mine has developed a fascination for nail polish and body glitter and silver-plated hoop earrings.

And while I waited outside in the hallway, listening to her laughter drift from her dressing room stall, I started to learn that I was up against something too big to slow down.

While the end of summer means back-to-school shopping, it also means the end of lazy mornings and late nights where we could stay up and play chess or watch TV without having to worry about school the next day.

It means my daughter is growing older, and that next summer I might not even be invited to come along on this shopping trip.

So as she paraded from her dressing room, modeling one outfit after another, I tried to keep that in mind, knowing that these moments are precious and few.

“How about this one, daddy?” she asked at one point. “Is it a keeper?”

Daddy? I was caught off guard. It’s a term she hardly uses anymore. But at that moment I knew that all wasn’t lost. Somewhere in those baggy, bell-bottom jeans was my little girl.

I don’t know how much longer she will be there. But I know that for now, at least, she’s still around.