Your baby’s first walking shoes – there are so many to choose. In these exciting times, your baby’s first steps are a joyful experience. So many great shoes are made today with style, comfort and support. For example, See Kai Run, is a baby shoe company started by two parents in Seattle that yearned for the perfect first shoe for their little boy.
In Style magazine wrote recently about the new trend of breaking the fashion rule of matching your shoes to your outfit. Gone are the days of matching accessories – instead have fun with shoes and go for bold colors and great styling. Why not apply this to your baby’s wardrobe. One of the most fun parts of being a mom is dressing my baby in comfortable and stylish clothing.
Bobux is another company that has some really cute and comfortable looking shoes. I love the look of red leather. It’s the perfect and happy-colored accent to any outfit for boys or girls. This shoe from Bobux also has some support around the ankle with an adjustable strap. Here’s a link to a deal on discontinued shoes on their website:
http://www.bobuxusa.com/s.nl/it.A/id.1007/.f?sc=2&category=126
The term baby luxe is defined as baby items that are luxury, heirloom quality with great style. It’s become popular in recent years as people are spending more time on how they dress, decorate and take care of themselves. This obsession with style and celebrity transfers to kids, babies and pets and transcends class, race and gender. What we wear says just as much as how we wear it.
Baby Luxe can also be environmentally and health conscious. In fact, I believe that the most luxe items are both conceptually and aesthetically pleasing. California Home Design Magazine recently spent a whole issue on environmentally conscious design. In the past, this niche of design was sparse and not necessarily eye candy. That has changed as more designers realize that item made from eco-conscious materials must also be saleable and aesthetically beautiful.
Zem Joaquin has created a business around this concept. She paid her dues in Milan as head of business development for the style website, Splendora. Today, Joaquin is a mainstream advocate for ’stylish green living’. She is on the board of the Green and Gorgeous yearly fundraiser, is a consultant to clothing companies, manufacturers and contracter, is a writer for the blog, Ecofabulous.com, and is an editor for House and Garden. She says, “we all aspire to live the glamorous life, and I don’t want to sacrifice that, but at the same time I want my children to survive as part of our species.”
Ultimately, I think the most baby luxe items are the ones that fulfill both our penchant for beauty and our love of sustaining a good life on earth.
I have become really interested in eco-design lately. Last night on 20/20, John Stossel covered our culture of ‘worry’. We tend to worry about our drinking water, pollution, and many other things. It’s really interesting how far we’ve come since the beginning of the industrial age. Drinking water, pollution and sanitation were a major problem at that time. Evolution and innovation are amazing – which is one of the marvelous things about eco-fashion and design. John Stein is a San Diego based entreprenuer that has managed to turn stalks of grain into a green building material.
This recycled-sorghum board is called kirei (pronounced “key-ray”) and means clean and beautiful in Japanese. Leftover stalks of sorghum, a grain that is used to make alcoholic beverages in China, are combined with nontoxic, sustainably harvested, zero-VOC adhesive to form a board that has the hardness of pine and some of the resilience of cork (from California Home Design Magazine, March, 2007).
Stein’s company has recently introduced a line of home furnishings made from other sustainable building materials too like wheat and hemp. His materials have gained serious buzz and have found their way into major retailers like Anthropologie. Although we may all worry about about our environment, I truly admire someone who takes risks to do something about it. That’s how our culture moves forward and evolves. That’s what our founding fathers did – they tooks risks to have a better life. Hip, hip kirei!
In Family Fun magazine, I saw a great way to add details to your denim. Have fun with your kids and be sure to supervise this project. Wear gloves and take a Clorox bleach pen. Draw a design on your jeans and set for about 30 minutes (or less depending on your desired result). Rinse with cold water to set and then wash with a light detergent and cold water in the washer. Hang to dry and you are ready to rock your new jeans!
My girls are thin and tall so this deal is one of the best out there. Take a pair of jeans that is getting short on your growing child. Then take some ribbon and go to the drycleaners or tailor. Ask them to cut and add the ribbon to make into some cute capris for the spring/summer.
I am really inspired by high fashion trends and reinterpreting them for children. Stripes are a really easy trend to incorporate into your child’s wardrobe. Zac Posen is a great designer with hip clientele and a celebrity folowing. Here’s his interpretation of stripes (please click on the photo for a better view):
Although the skirt is striped, his modern take gives a nice detailing to the stripes with tone on tone coloring and a ‘track’ like detail. For your baby, you can have fun dressing them in cute stripes. Splendid makes some really comfy striped loungewear that can be found in most boutiques. I’ve also found that a lot of these styles from Splendid are on sale lately.
Here’s another link to a fresh take on stripes:
http://shopbabyluxe.com/hipster-stripes-and-dots.html
Dots are another cool element in fashion these days. Tea Collection makes a lot of layettes with dot-like prints.
I saw a segment on Pretty in Sherman Oaks during the ‘Dancing with the Stars’ season with Joey Lawrence. He had his daughter dressed in jewel toned onesies with these tulle and flower wrap skirts. Extremely girly and cute.
A really nice lady helped me when I visited the shop. It seems that the specialize in custom made dresses for weddings and formal occassions. Not what I thought it would be, but it’s a great place to order a custom made dress. They also have some Nicole Miller bridesmaid dresses, but everything else is custom.
Pretty is located at 13814 Ventura Blvd. in Sherman Oaks and their phone number is 818-817-0976.
For those of you that love to dress your kids like a star, Fred Segal is the place to get all the cool apparel for kids. Here’s a link to their baby and kids sale boutique that you never hear about:
http://www.ronrobinsoninc.com/shopthesale.php
There’s over 19 pages of sale items, including True Religion, Diesel, Paper Denim jeans at 50% off. Cool deal!
I found a really cool store in San Fran that specializes in environmentally friendly furnishings and linens. Eco-Terric has a feng-shui slant with environmental information that really makes sense. There’s a section that details bedrooms, their set-up and how we spend 1/3 of our lives sleeping. Placement and electro-magnetic fields is really important to resting our bodies – so are organic sheets! I found some really great information at this website and will also include in my blogroll.
www.eco-terric.com
Your baby’s first walking shoes – there are so many to choose. In these exciting times, your baby’s first steps are a joyful experience. So many great shoes are made today with style, comfort and support. For example, See Kai Run, is a baby shoe company started by two parents in Seattle that yearned for the perfect first shoe for their little boy.
