Photo Credit: Jours Apres Lunes website (Censored by Handbag)
French fashion brand ‘Jours Apres Lunes’ (which translates as Days after Moons) has launched a ‘loungerie’ range for four to twelve year olds, including sets of bras and knickers. The collection is being promoted with pictures of very young girls wearing makeup, their hair in beehives as they pose seductively with sunglasses.
Yes - you did just read that correctly, and yes, we are also genuinely disturbed by this. When Handbag.com first heard about Jours Apres Lunes, we thought the whole thing had been exaggerated for the sake of a good story. But a quick trip to the brand’s website showed us how wrong we were. The photos of the child models look frankly strange – they have been styled like grown ups (and grown-up lingerie models at that), and while their poses are meant to be cute; they’re also pulling coy faces like mini Hollywood starlets. It’s just straight-up creepy. (NB: We are not publishing the pictures here, or linking to the website, for obvious reasons. We've censored the one shot to the left.) In the wake of last week’s scandal surrounding 10-year-old model Thylane Blondeau’s seductive shoot in Paris Vogue , we thought we’d seen it all when it came to young girls and fashion pictures. Maybe we were wrong – at least Thylane was covered up!
As for the collection, lingerie designer Sophie Morin has called the items ‘loungerie’ – a play on loungewear and lingerie – but if that is meant to downplay their adult styling, it doesn’t work. No four-year-old will ever need a triangle bra top, let alone one trimmed with ruffles of black mesh or pink lace. It’s not entirely seedy; there are a few plain vests and crop tops that would be appropriate for a small girl, however even some of those have been inexplicably trimmed with lace.
The fact that worries us most about this strange collection is that someone (presumably designer Morin) thinks that this was actually a good idea: that there really is a corner of the market that’s crying out for lingerie for under 12’s.What we want to know is, who buys this stuff? Is it mothers, who are so enthralled by fashion that they want to dress their daughters in the same things they would wear? Or is it the kids, influenced by their older peers, that are asking for more adult clothes? Either way, there seems to be a worrying trend in fashion at the moment of using sexualised images of children to sell clothes, and as far as we’re concerned, this is something that needs to be addressed, and stopped right now.
What do you think? Are we right to condemn the use of suggestive images of children to sell clothes? Do you know anyone who’d buy lingerie for a child? Or do you think we’re being hyper-sensitive about the whole thing? Leave your comments below or on our Twitter and Facebook pages.
