Dreaming of a Greige Christmas
Aggressively neutral kids' toys are flooding the market. What can they say about parenthood and class?
Howdy! This is a paywalled mid-week MomLeft for paid subscribers. Free subscribers will receive a roundup newsletter on Friday, then I’m taking a week off for the holidays!
Due to personal failings, I always leave all my Christmas shopping until the last minute. Consequently I’ve spent the past week in the depths of shopping malls and fast-shipping websites best left unexplored.
I’ve come away with some adequate gifts and a jarring realization: kids’ things are greige now. They’re the color of a cottagecore moodboard. They’re the color of a Kardashian pantry. They’re of an unsettling neutral palette that both demands and scorns analysis.
I’d been somewhat aware of this trend. Last year, according to a Wall Street Journal article inaugurating the “sad beige” trend, Etsy searches for beige children’s clothing jumped 67 percent. There was a half-hearted backlash, not firmly supported by data, to argue that colorless aesthetics risked stunting children’s brain development. That’s not my business, I reasoned at the time. Let the people have their Instagram-optimized nurseries.
But having browsed more fully on sites bedecked in hospice-grade neutrals, my hackles are raised. I am not soothed. Somewhere, an algorithm has broken loose and is iterating on itself, churning out ever-greiger children’s gear without intervention from an actual child.
Please look at this selection of play pits from an upscale toy shop called “Gathre.” I’m not even cherry-picking. These are the available colors, plus one called “camel” (a darker beige) and another called “dawn” (gray with a tantalizing suggestion of blue).
You can fill your millet ball pit with ivory or untanned balls. (The more exciting trilogy of “naturals” is sold out. You will simply have to make do.) The entire website is like this, as are those of other relatively new brands. Major retailers are also in on the trend. Here, have some items from Pottery Barn Kids:
Why the sudden interest in the ivory-to-camel color spectrum? Why am I so invested in a $575 bouncy house that I would not buy in any color?
Style is political, even if it’s stupid. And there’s a bright, beige line connecting the perceived gaudiness of plastic toys as they plummet in price, and the perceived wholesomeness of natural-tone wood products that mimic the aesthetic of an increasingly unaffordable Montessori education. As parents, one of the easiest ways to envision upward mobility for our children is to swaddle them in aspirational class signifiers—which, in late 2023, are conspicuously, provocatively bland.