Posted on 06/13/2009 7:41:59 AM PDT by reaganaut1
The princess industry has been booming in the past few years -- not just the Disney dolls and scratchy toy-store ball gowns that are a rite of passage in most American girlhoods, but a brazen new breed of princess products that target a far wider age range and tap into less seemly attitudes. The hot-pink, leopard-print princess backpacks, T-shirts, purses and bedspreads that girls are now buying (or, rather, their parents are buying for them) have little to do with indulging sweet princess fantasies and everything to do with catering to over-indulged princess egos. [Taste] Sara Schwartz
Take the popular tween retailer Justice. At malls nationwide, it carries multiple "Princess" tops and accessories that look a lot more like Paris Hilton's attire than Snow White's. No surprise that part of its marketing slogan is "Love yourself."
For only $44 at Nordstrom, you can dress your toddler in a tank top that declares her to be a "Juicy Couture Princess" -- that is, someone whose parents can afford to buy designer shirts that will end up stained with ketchup or jelly. And until recently, numerous Saks stores maintained Club Libby Lu, a spa for 5- to 13-year-old girls offering princess makeovers with tube tops and miniskirts that left girls looking more like Real Housewives than Cinderella. The ailing retailer closed the tween operation in May, but it grossed $60 million in 2008.
Call it trickle-down narcissism. Today, even as the economic crisis continues, many middle-class parents aspire to give their daughters the best of everything, "the best" meaning the most expensive. A quick tour around suburbia will show princess-themed bedrooms (the rhinestoned-and-feathered kind, not the cartoon-character kind) and ostentatious birthday parties, as well as pedigreed dogs being toted in designer bags by 10-year-olds.
(Excerpt) Read more at online.wsj.com ...
Indeed!
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Please, there’ve been spoiled princesses for the past zillion years. What else is new....
I live in a small southern town. It’s ALWAYS been that way here. Mothers and daughters sometimes have matching haircuts.
Oof! Assuming that a big recession/depression is coming along that will last for several years, this kind of attitude in half the population is going to be painful.
That may be but to be a princess in the 50’s I put on a dress of my mothers and dime store jewelry. I did not look like a prostitute at age 8.
“Please, there’ve been spoiled princesses for the past zillion years. What else is new.....”
What’s new is that for the first time in history, a country’s men have allowed those emotion-over-reason ‘princesses’ to drive the political direction of the world’s superpower. And now we deal with the consequences of that superpower falling apart as a result.
ITA!!
“Please, there’ve been spoiled princesses for the past zillion years. What else is new....”
Yes, we’ve always spent 10-15 grand on high school proms for our princesses.
Silly. It was jeans and T-shirts for me. For my 10th birthday my dad gave me a .22 rifle. So much more fun than a designer bag or a poodle.
LOL..This is news?
bm
And one of these “emotion over reason” princesses is about to become a Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States.
Except for the word 'Princess' tattooed across her chest...
I know three local men (small business owners) who went to China and married Chinese women for wives. They say they can’t stand American women.
I've 6 kids and 4 grandkids. I've street cred....
In the 1930’s the Moms coming out of the depression years of their childhoods wanted their daughters to be Shirley Temple.
I am old enough to remember all the memorabilia, tap dance lessons, and being forced to submit to “Tony Home permanents” to get a head of curley hair.
Nowdays we “princess Moms” have fewer kids and more money, but the same tendency to want to recapture the fantasies of our own childhoods thru our daughters. Unfortunately the slutty Gollywood culture takes "glamour" things way too far and some stupid vapid people indulge their children in it.
When I read stuff like this, it makes me glad I had a son! I would not have known what to do with a ‘princess’. I was a baseball playing, horseback riding, skinned knee tomboy...lol.
“and being forced to submit to “Tony Home permanents” to get a head of curley hair..”
OMG..can’t believe you brought up Tony Home Perms. I would have rather been waterboarded....lol!!
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