Last week, after much nerve-wracking manipulation of our crowded schedules, my friends and I were able to escape up to a cottage on Georgian Bay. Getting out of the GTA took forever (as did loading the boat with our heavy, clinking bags of alcohol) but we figured we had just enough time to make it to the island before sundown. Unfortunately, ten minutes out from the dock, our boat caught fire.
First the engine made a sputtering noise, then emitted a terrible smell. When we spotted smoke, someone told our Australian friend Andy to use the fire extinguisher. “Right, mate!” After a nervous pause, he sprayed it all over the back of the boat with abandon. (Had it been me, I probably would’ve turned into Basil Fawlty and sprayed myself in the face.) Just as we began coughing in the billowing grey smoke, another boat came to rescue us. That night we stayed at a Best Western, watched wedding shows, and attempted to unburden our load by “drinking the boat light.”
Compared to our near death experience, once we made it to the island, the rest of the weekend was uneventful. We did what you do at a cottage–eat potato chips and read magazines. It wouldn’t be a cottage weekend without trashy, celebrity tabloids to act as junk food for the mind. At a gas station on the way up I bought one of those US Weekly-In Touch rags that always have a Kardashian on the cover. The next day after flipping through it my friend complained about a “Who wore it better?” spread featuring the kids of celebrities.
“These are children,” she said. “And we’re judging what they wear and comparing them to eachother? I feel a bit ill.” That happens after too much junk food.
It’s hard to remember a time before kids like Suri Cruise, Romeo Beckham, and the Jolie-Pitt brood garnered almost as much ink as their famous parents, often for what they wear. But with the rise of social media, you no longer have to be the offspring of a celebrity to get your 15 minutes of fashion fame.
Enter Alonso Mateo, five-year-old “internet style icon.” Instead of dressing like a cute little kid in t-shirts and overalls, Alsono wears Tom Ford, Dior, and Diesel jeans like a European sophisticate, albeit in miniature size. I don’t think the clothes alone account for his 127,000 followers on Instagram. You need to see the kid’s posing to believe it. Barely out of diapers, Alonso already has the model’s nonchalant stance as he dips his hands in his pockets and peers out from behind Ray-Ban aviators. It’s cute for the same reasons it’s creepy–he’s a toddler posing like a grown man.
Although much coverage focuses on Alonso’s personal sense of style and his ability to take ‘selfies,’ it’s hardly a coincidence that his mother, Luisa Espinosa, is a freelance stylist. She’s the one who buys the clothes, takes a lot of the pictures, runs the Instagram account, and acts like the boy’s manager. “I’ll help him coordinate outfits so that they make sense,” Espinosa modestly told The Cut, “but mostly it’s him.”
Without being a member of his family, it’s difficult to know how much of what Alonso wears is a reflection of his true self (whatever that may be at five years old) rather than the projection of his mother’s interests, but there’s a general feeling children shouldn’t be living dolls for their parents. That’s the basis for the popularity of the “My Imaginary Well-Dressed Toddler Daughter” parody Pinterest board created by writer Tiffany Beveridge. A mother of two boys, Beveridge found ads for little girls’ clothing strange and hilarious, and invented a style-conscious preschooler (the fabulously named ‘Quinoa’) who’s able to pull off all the looks.
Beveridge combines images from catalogues, fashion shoots, and, of course, Pinterest, and matches them with sardonic jokes, written in a sing songy, mommy diary manner. “It’s family lore that Quinoa was actually born wearing a pair of Coach sunglasses. (Thank goodness she was a C-section!)” “Quinoa always keeps a spare ‘urban outfit’ in my purse in the event we’re going to be around a lot of chain link fencing.” My personal favourite: “When Quinoa wants volume, she doesn’t just tease her hair, she relentlessly bullies it.”
The site makes fun of absurd fashion trends, cheesy photography, glum-looking child models, trendy kid names (Quinoa’s friends are Chevron and Hampton) and Pinterest itself, but the largest joke is the narratator’s voice, the indulgent mother who blithely spoils her daughter even as she becomes a narcisstic nightmare.
It’s not for me to say how parents should dress their children. My parents dressed me in hand-me-downs, cycling shorts, and Jellies, and now I write about fashion. Parents using their children’s wardrobes as an excuse to embrace their personal sartorial dreams (ballerinas, princesses, sailors) is nothing new. What is new is social media and the ability for a five-year-old not related to Tom Cruise to become famous. Alonso may chose to wear a pocket square, but he didn’t chose to have roughly 230,000 photographs of him floating around the web. We all have embarrassing pictures of ourselves (like I said, cycling shorts and Jellies!), but mostly they’re safely protected in our parents’ photoalbums. There’s no way of knowing how Alonso will feel about his profileration of selfies once he’s a rebellious teenager and can never get them back.
Sometimes when he leaves the house, fans approach Alonso and his family to get a picture with him. (Who these people who’d stalk a five-year-old are, I don’t want to know.) Like most young children, Espinonsa says her son can be shy: “Sometimes he’ll turn down a fan and say he’s too tired.” It’s a statement Beveridge could have written, except it reads as sad rather than funny. Celebrity shouldn’t get in the way of nap time.
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Max Mosher writes about style for Toronto Standard. You can follow him on Twitter at @max_mosher_.
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