Obsessive superhero dress-ups and other fashion fails

You’re not going out in that are you? Kids seem to have selective hearing when you suggest their outfit isn’t appropriate.

For some kids a mask and cape are the perfect accessories to wear out shopping.

“You’re not going out wearing THAT, are you?”

It’s a classic query heard in households, and no generation is safe from its laser-like intent.

It might be the exasperated sigh of a partner when their bloke throws on his favourite, tattered band T-shirt – let’s say AC/DC ’88 – for dinner with the in-laws.

Or the disbelieving remark of that bloke when his teenage daughter heads off to a party in a dress so short that in our day it would have been sold as a top.

Or the mortified wail of that teenage daughter back to their father, when he gets in the car to drop her off at said soiree … wearing a World’s Greatest Dad cap.

Or, if you’re famed fashion designer and film director Tom Ford, it’s a tut-tut to your four-year-old son’s favourite footwear.

Sometimes a game of dress-ups just gets out of hand.

A magazine profile on Ford recently revealed his young lad has light-up dinosaur shoes, which he tries to wear to school until TF catches him.

“What does Dada say about the dinosaur shoes?”

“They’re tacky.”

“And when are we allowed to wear them?”

“On weekends.”

Make of that what you will. I’m no big fan of flashy-lighty shoes, but I’d still let my kid dazzle his daycare buddies with them.

(Then again, people don’t pay me millions to be a style maven like Tom Ford … if they did you’d all be getting around in the same, unforgiving horizontal stripes that I seem unable to stop buying.) It’s tricky though – once a small child gets fixated on wearing a particular piece of attire, it’s damn near impossible to coax them out of it without sparking a monumental meltdown.

Day in, day out they demand to wear the exact same thing despite your pleas to put on the smart new outfit that Granny gave them.

Chief culprit in this obsessive clothing disorder is the superhero or princess dressup.

I don’t wish to gender stereotype here, but I’ve known of little boys who refuse to take off their Star Wars suit for weeks – even to bed, so their parents have to peel the whiffy costume off them in the night for washing, then ease them back into it before wakeup.

And there are girls dragging around 24/7 in the same Frozen frock, which eventually gets so tatty that Elsa looks somewhat worse for wear.

I said I’d never make a Frozen joke in this column, but kids: let it go.

Other children insist on wearing their hero’s footy guernsey until it looks like got the club games record, or the adored party dress that eventually gets so small they almost need to be stitched into it, like a Hollywood starlet on Oscars night.

My kids are mostly past that stage now, save for the seven-year-old, who begs to wear her rollershoes out the door every day.

These are hand-me-down sneakers with a thick wheel built into the sole.

It’s not so much their aesthetics I worry about as the 10 times a minute she falls over spectacularly in them ... because plaster is so hard to dress up.

Miranda Murphy is a mother of three and a journalist at The Australian.

Follow her on Twitter @murphymiranda