Rosemary McLeod: Dressed to impress

I'm one of those tragic women who can't bring themselves to turf out their own baby clothes, even if holes have slowly started to appear in them.

I'm too impressed by the fine knitting my mother was capable of as a young woman, and the little embroidered details that embellished my frocks and petticoats: I'd never be so feminine again.

Before I could walk I was dressed like a princess, and before I could talk and answer back she may have thought I was one.

Mothers at that time were expected to knit layettes for their babies, and dress children well in garments either knitted at home, or sewn on their treadle machine.

There was a level of unspoken competition among them over the miracles that could be wrought with half a yard of winceyette from a sale bin and a scrap of ric-rac, and my mother always seemed to triumph. Women like her showed a willingness to commit to motherhood in the post-war years when domestic life was pumped up as their natural destiny.

Rich women could quietly pay others to create such mundane marvels for them, but mothers with little money could make equally cute baby clothes, and that seemed fitting in the kind of society we thought we wanted, where everyone would - in theory at least - have an equal chance in life.

You could say there was egalitarianism in matinee jackets.

So I keep my decorative little garments - what on earth were matinee jackets for, anyway? - survivors of a time when the rich didn't flaunt their wealth the way they do now, and you couldn't go out and buy anything as good as what your mother made.

The past, fairly obviously, was another country. We have moved on. Wish, then, that you'd been at Gucci's flagship store on Auckland's Queen St last week, where the children of the rich can now go to be clad in little garments of exquisite taste and price tag, with magic Gs sprinkled all over them like chickenpox.

Gucci's children's collection was being displayed there for the first time, over champagne and canapes for the proud parents who attended, and mini milkshakes and lollies for their privileged darlings.

"Chicky is modelling for them," said Sally Ridge, "She is so excited. She loves modelling." Chicky is 4. Her father is a former test cricketer, and her sister's father is a former All Black. Top sportsmen make heaps of money these days.

The tot's clothing collection, explained a Gucci spokeswoman, is "inspired by the English countryside".

That would strike just the right note of nostalgia among well-heeled toddlers, whose Gucci wardrobes will certainly set them apart from the under-privileged of - say - South Auckland, or indeed, anywhere else I can think of.

At Saks Fifth Avenue in America, where the Gucci children's range is also sold, the garments are costly and heavily logo-ed, as expensive clothes should be, or what's the point? A toddler's Gucci scarf will set you back US$220, an infant's print leggings, bound to be wet through almost immediately, US$95. The wise mother will buy half a dozen. A little boy's quilted jacket is a friendly US$595, and an infant's hooded Montgomery coat a modest US$475; one would hardly want to be seen in anything as cheap as that.

I'd be enchanted by little leather sneakers at US$185, and would have rushed the toddlers' neckties at US$85.

Ms Ridge said she thought a little coat could be a sensible purchase for Chicky because she'd wear it a lot, and quite I see her point. She could wear it for ages and ages at her age, possibly for six months. Besides, it would be an investment. You can't start kids off too young in the knowledge that they belong to the financial elite, not when we've just drifted to near the bottom of the scale in outcomes for children of the developed nations, a club to which some of us, a very few of us only, still belong.