How to Deal With Stylish Babies
One of the biggest dilemmas facing slobs who live in fashion-forward cities like New York is what to do when faced with tiny children who are better-dressed than us.
Seeing babies who are way better-dressed than you are is a regular occurrence in New York, if you're as much a dedicated slob as I am. Even more common, and almost as disconcerting: coming across babies who are wearing exactly the same outfit as you.
The usual self-defense deployed by slobs against the stylish—that we don't care about such 'superficial' things as the brand of our clothes, or whether we are wearing matching shoes—does not apply to babies, because babies are not superficial, they're just babies. A well-dressed baby is a simple, stark reminder that we, adult humans, are dressed worse than someone who regularly poops their pants.
And the typical mockery of stylish people, with which so many slobs console ourselves over having walked out of the house looking like if a modern-day college sophomore had been transported to the Dust Bowl of the 1930s, seems mean-spirited. That baby did not drive a tiny baby luxury car to the baby mall and buy his crisp little oxfords and fedora and $90 throwback Nikes with a baby black American Express card. Any judgmental look on its face is a coincidence, due to the fact that its brain hasn't yet developed the region of the brain required for judgement; its facial muscles are too weak to form a proper sneer.
On the other hand, look at this goddamn baby. Caiden (of course) Silverstein, has been named one of the 50 most-stylish New Yorkers by Stylecaster. His parents have built a whole "personal shopping for babies" business, "Caiden's Closet", around Caiden. How does one process the idea of a baby fashion icon?
Personally, whenever I see a stylish child like Caiden while out for a stroll in whichever one of my two pairs of pants is least stained that day, I console myself by imagining that baby's rebellious teenage period. As a teen, having been meticulously groomed by his parents for years, that kid is going to become the world's biggest slob—it's inevitable. And one day I will be walking down the street and will see this slobby teen in his enormous Dragon Ball Z t-shirt and dirty white sneakers, and our eyes will meet and slowly roll together into the back of our heads—the secret handshake of the slob—at his parents, who have now become those weird hyper-trendy old people (another issue). And it will be a great day for slobs everywhere.