Tailoring Sans the Sewing Machine: A New Way for Girls to Play Dress-Up
by Michelle Burford, ParentDish.com
For all the muttering in recent years about offering children gender-neutral toys, let’s face it: Most girls still like playing dress-up as much as most boys like playing with toys that go crash, boom, or ka-bang. In 2008 when seamstress Kari Kawa wanted to give her then-5-year-old daughter the same hours of unlimited creativity that a LEGO set provides her 7-year-old son, she got an idea: Why not offer children the opportunity to design personalized get-ups, starting with a pink-and-white polka dot dress form and dozens of vibrantly-colored swaths of fabric?
One year and several spools of thread later, Kari’s lightbulb moment has become one of the hottest new trends in girls’ dress-up. Through her company, Style Paige LLC, Kari created Shailie—an award-winning design kit that comes with mix-and-match sleeves, skirts, tops, sashes, and trims that can be attached to a dress form with Velcro fasteners, then worn around the house during playtime. You could call it a Project Runway for kids: Without needing a sewing machine or patterns (hold the applause, moms), your daughter can experiment with a DIY fashion line.
At the 2009 Toy Fair, Kari and her team turned their booth’s aisleway into a catwalk (by the way, you can swing by anytime and see them at booth 6323). On February 17, Kari invited two students from New York’s FIT (Fashion Institute of Technology) to participate in a designer face-off. After gathering passers-by judged the final designs (onlookers voted by clapping most loudly for the designs they loved best), Kari ended the contest by squeezing into the winning designs and strutting down the makeshift runway to show off the creations.
Got a girl who’s a bit, um, chubby? With childhood obesity on the rise in this country, you’ve got gobs of company. Though Shailee is designed for average-sized girls between the ages of 5 and 13 (the dress form is actually based on an 8-year-old’s frame), fear not: The set’s expandable skirt, for instance, can fit a girl with a waist of up to 45 inches—oh, the wonders of Velcro. And even if your girl can’t manage to squeeze her booty into one of her own designs, Kari says that many Shailie lovers—particularly tweens, teens, and yes, even some women—simply enjoy testing out new looks on the dress form; some buy their own fabric to expand their wardrobe options. Oh, and one more thing: You can order in two sizes—Little Miss (ages 5-7) or Miss (ages 8 and up). The dresses in the Miss set are longer.
Nickel pinchers, brace yourselves: The Shailee starter kit retails for $255 (the set includes a dress form, a base outfit, a few skirts and a sash, and a sparkly top); additional clothing kits run betwee n $30 and $120. The owner, Kari, is showing mercy to our pocketbooks with a special offer she concocted right here at Toy Fair 2009: Cash-strapped parents can buy just the dress form for $150; or the base outfits can be purchased for $89. You might consider this a kind of layaway plan: first comes the form, then comes the fabric—and finally comes the chance for your kid to engage in a kazillion hours of creative fun.
