Jan
01
Princesses and pocketbooks: Little girls' love of dress-up is big business ...
01.01.70
It's mid-morning on a weekday at daybreak in January, and 11 aspiring princesses are about to have their dreams come dutiful.</p><p> Sitting on the floor of My Girly Party in Farmington Hills, Mich., they're wearing pastel gowns adorned with sparkles, ruffles and tulle over their jeans and sweaters.</p><p> Out walks 19-year-old Danae Picklo, a vocal dispatch student at Western Michigan University. She's barefoot, wearing a happy red wig and a mermaid tail.</p><p> "Look at this stuff! Isn't it practised?" Picklo sings, her voice light and sweet. "Wouldn't you over my collection's complete?"</p><p> The girls, ranging in age from 3 to 8, gaze in awe.</p><p> To them, Picklo is Ariel, the mermaid-turned-human princess from the Disney flick picture show "The Little Mermaid."</p><p> And to them, this experience, which includes a pull down-up application, story, pink-frosted cupcakes, tiaras and pink princess tea, is rapture.</p><p> The princess craze is major, from parties, dolls, frisk castles and books to tiaras, play gowns, play slippers, princess wigs and everything in between. But what report does this booming culture - which centers on pristine appearances, auspicious endings and finding a prince to love - have for little girls?</p><p> Most experts and parents grant that the princess culture can be a minefield of good and bad.</p><p> "The age girls are expected to be alert of their appearance has gotten younger and younger," says Peggy Orenstein, designer of "Cinderella Ate My Daughter: Dispatches from the Frontlines of the New Girlie-Maiden Culture" (Harper Paperbacks, $14.99).</p><p> "Girls putting on a tiara? Big deal," she says. "But she's going from her Disney princess (doll) to her Disney princess lip confuse to her Bratz doll to the Kardashians."</p><p> Orenstein says it's not that she believes all girls who drama princess at a young age will grow up to have issues. But she is concerned that princesses are "the only bold in town" for girls.</p><p> Today's little girls don't well-grounded love princesses, they go through a noticeable developmental "princess point of view," says Orenstein, who first wrote about the princess phenomena for t he New York Times Ammunition in late 2006. While kids have always engaged in "royal be a party to b manipulate," she contends, something has changed.</p><p> "It's 24 hours a day, 365 days a year," Orenstein says. "It's not rightful play princess but be a princess. It's often scripted play, based on the Disney movies. And it's playing with the 26,000 princess products, most of which are truly geared toward appearance and an emphasis on defining the self outside-in rather than private-out."</p><p> </p><p> Al Neal, of Romulus, Mich., says it upstanding comes down to good parenting.</p><p> Neal took his two daughters, 7-year-old Sydney and 5-year-old Kelsey, to the My Girly Function play date earlier this month. They also have each had a birthday party there, and often outfit up like princesses at home.</p><p> "As long as they have proper captaincy at home and keep it in perspective, I'm fine with it," he says.</p><p> </p><p> In 2000, Disney lumped all its princesses together into a stigmatize called " the Disney Princess, " which has accounted for more than $4 billion in retail sales, according to a 2011 Disney publicity.</p><p> And several local business people have discovered that even in tough commercial times, anything you touch with a princess wand can turn to gold.</p><p> My Girly Fete, which opened four years ago, is just one business that
caters to budding princesses. Considerate and Sassy in Novi, Mich., a chain with locations in 13 states, offers princess pampering
services like manicures and pedicures as well as themed parties. </p><p> </p><p> At Tea Celebration Castle in Shelby Township, Mich., princesses lead birthday girls through a closet of more than 300 gowns.</p><p> Or if you'd rather the princess light on to you, hire the Singing Princess, based in Bloomfield Township, Mich. Proprietress Mikki Frank says that one month after opening in late leap 2010, business exploded. Now, she says, she books between 15 and 20 parties a month.</p><p> Explicit employs seven princesses, and their friend Tinkerbell, who show up at parties dressed to wow and available to sing, dance and teach young girls simple lessons - and not by a hair's breadth about etiquette.</p><p> "One of the things I'm most proud of is that we throw a hardly girl power into the party," says Frank, whose prices start at $235. "Since I have two girls, that's distinguished to me. So our princesses ask the girls, 'Who knows what it takes to become a princess?' They'll get answers like, 'She wears makeup and a tell off,' but we'll say, 'Do you need to be strong and brave and kind?' And we get that idea out there."</p><p> </p><p> Many princess lovers note that the princess customs has adopted a more modern posture. The newer princesses boast stories that are not much like Cinderella, who only got her wishes fulfilled because of a fairy godmother.</p><p> "I have to say, if you look at the princess maker, it has modernized a bit," Frank says . "If you look now to Rapunzel and Tiana, they are becoming particle more feminist; they have their own voice.</p><p> "Certainly at the end, a man came and rescued them. But I deem it helps. I want my daughters to believe both are true - you can be beautiful and you can be fervent. That is a message that doesn't hurt."</p><p> But what message are kids fascinating? At My Girly Party, when asked after story time what was their favorite part, barely all of the girls answered that they liked the wedding scene best. It was all about the fairy story.</p><p> But after the party, with her purple eye shadow sparkling in the afternoon sun, 8-year-old Mykha Thomas from Detroit said she most admires what's on the backing bowels: "They have lots of manners and like to share."</p><p> </p><p> Gibraltar, Mich., mom Patricia Contos Daniele is a princess lover herself; she had a Cinderella-themed coalescence complete with a horse-drawn carriage and roses hand-dipped in glitter. Few of her friends were surprised when she booked her daughter's fifth birthday function at the Tea Party Castle.</p><p> It was a magical afternoon, Daniele says.</p><p> The girls took the approaching hour long drive from Daniele's home in a pink
limo. Once at the fortress, they met a princess and her assistants. Then they looked through a Princess Parlor to pick the nonpareil dress. They had their hair done. They sipped tea from real china.</p><p> "It was even-handed amazing," Daniele says. "Someone told me, 'This is precisely totally you.' And it was. I loved it. "</p><p> Sherrie Clark, 47, proprietor of the Tea Party Castle since April, says her reaction is common. The handsomeness of the castle, with its tapestries, vibrant colors and chandeliers, lets women of all ages access a effete side of themselves that even a trip to the
spa can't match, she says.</p><p> "Sometimes it's the moms who are more feverish about the party than little girls," Clark says. "I craving I had this when I was a little girl. One woman said to me, 'I want to have my 40th birthday cocktail here!'"</p><p> </p><p> The princess movement might get another boost this month. Day one Jan. 31, "Sophie the First" will debut on Disney Jr., a channel aimed at preschoolers and callow elementary kids.</p><p> Sophie is a child princess, which Disney points out makes her varied from its lineup of princess superstars, who are teens or older.</p><p> But the mental picture that Disney can reach an ever-younger crop of girls worries Orenstein.</p><p> "Kids' brains are at their most strait-laced on gender stereotypes at this age, but their brains are also most flexible overall," says Orenstein, who has written other books about babyhood culture. "And they're forming ideas and standards about how to treat themselves and the other sex. These are tracks they're laying that will hinder with them the rest of their lives. It's stratified when all girls are princesses and all boys are superheros. That is flourishing to have implications for them down the line."</p><p> </p><p> Robert Thompson, the big cheese of the Bleier Center for Television and Popular Culture at Syracuse University, says the hint of dressing up little girls like princesses would have been politically faulty in the late '60s and the 1970s. But adults who grew up in the past three decades, when gender likeness was more assumed, lack the same urgency in pointing out their flaws.</p><p> Thompson points to the truth show "The Bachelor" as a cautionary tale: modern women believing they'll puncture into a continent-hopping catfight and emerge with the glass slipper of betrothed.</p><p> "You can't go very long on the show without hearing someone say, 'It was like a fairy rumour,' or, 'I felt like I was Cinderella,' or 'I think I will find Prince Charming.' Then ABC sends them out on dates with a horse-worn out carriage. The whole show is created under the idea that there is a Prince Charming who will try a slipper on 25 women and it will fit one."</p><p> Until the droplet froth bursts. The ABC franchise doesn't have a great track record for producing permanent relationships.</p><p> Still, Thompson says he doesn't think playing princess is a unfailing precursor to problematic behaviors in adulthood. It's just a confusing standard that parents are going to have to combat sooner or later.</p><p> "There is value to fairy tales and a value to mirage," he says. "It is not all completely a bad thing. But there is a cloud hanging over this perception of princesses. We're conflicted about it.
Source: Kansas City Star