Sexual Heeling

Should we be worried about the increasing number of pre-teen girls wearing high heels, make-up and sexy fashions?

They are glamorous, teetering clip-clop shoes and, hurrah, the shop has them in your size. Just one consideration – you are only five years old!

High heels are increasingly popular among five to 12 year-old-girls. Traditional companies like Clarks and Start Rite still make flat, sensible children’s shoes with a modest nod to fashion in the form of a dash of glitter or an appliqué pink flower.

However, shoe shops at the budget end of the market now sell disturbingly sexed-up footwear for little girls: often with alluring style names like the ‘Lambada shoe’ or the ‘Beyonce boot’. Some have staggeringly high heels considering they are designed for preteen girls.

Available in the tiniest of sizes – sometimes even small enough to fit an average three-year-old - they appear intended for everyday wear rather than just parties. Little girls yearn for them, harass their mothers to buy them and sometimes even save their pocket money to afford them. They rank high in most fashion-conscious preteen girls’ pester list.

My daughter is nine. I’d like her to wear sensible, flat pumps or trainers – at least until she’s a teenager - rather than distort her growing feet in the revoltingly sexy high-heeled black boots she spotted online at Barratts shoes.

I’m standing my ground. But it’s tough against a rising tide of sexed-up tweeny fashions that transform preteens into tiny Lolitas with off the shoulder tops, mini-skirts, foundation, lipstick, nail-varnish, earrings and soaring heels.

Walk around any shopping mall on a Saturday and you’ll find a surprisingly large headcount of pre-teens click-clacking in high heels and wearing make-up and fashions more suited to Girls Aloud than primary school pupils.

Lured early into consumer culture, girls age six and seven are now miming to pop videos and experimenting with make-up and grown-up fashion styles. By the age of three most are already adept at dressing their tarty-looking Bratz dolls in provocative outfits.

It’s a worrying new trend that sees tiny children aspire to Bratz-style hooker-chic and sexy outfits – mimicking what they see on their favourite dolls and pop stars. The marketers call this trend KGOY – kids growing older younger. In practice, it means fashions worn by twenty some-things are trickling down to the preteen market.

Pop-star style is definitely the main influence on Adina Rencontre (corr spell), an aspiring model from Rascals Model Agency, in Woodford Green, Essex (***subbing note – must leave reference to Rascals Agency***). She’s just 11, but she wants to look like sultry Latino singer Jennifer Lopez. At the weekend Adina transforms herself into a Tweeny version of her sexy idol by wearing the same skinny black jeans, peep-toe high heels, a black figure-hugging waistcoat and fake tan.

‘I am vain and I dress like J-Lo because she looks good. I like doing my hair and make-up. I get my nails filed and painted every two weeks. I would love to have my belly button pierced but mum won’t let me,’ says Adina.

Her mum Sam Grover, a 41-year-old retail manager, allows Adina to wear heels in the evenings and weekends, but rules them out for school – and bans tight, low-cut tops. ‘You don’t want them to look too grown up when they go out, but it’s hard nowadays because they grow up so quickly.’

Tiny Lauren Halil, from London, has been wearing high heels out in public since she turned five. A year later she’s can now walk in them confidently. Her favourites are a glittery pair of two-inch high slip-ons. She’s also pretty good at applying her make-up and adds a touch of foundation, blue eye-shadow and pink lipstick to complete her look.

‘I love make-up. Out of school I usually wear blue eyeshadow, a bit of pink lipstick and foundation – mum helps me put it on.’

Lauren’s mum Marina Halil, 51, an accountant, bought the foundation from a shopping channel and lets her wear a little because it makes her happy.

‘She is the only one of her friends who has high heels, but I think it depends on the child and how they are. Lauren is steady on her feet and walks well in them – and I never let her wear them with short skirts,’ says Marina.

Make-up mad sisters Ashleigh Gudgeon (corr spell), eight, and 10-year-old Alex have already amassed a gigantic stockpile of glitzy cosmetics. Their passion began when they were made up for a photo shoot for the Power Model Agency, in Norwich (***subbing note – must leave reference to Power Models***). Saturday morning is time for experimenting with their vast collection of tubs, tubes and pots of colour, expertly making their faces to go out shopping in the afternoon.

‘I realized how nice I looked with make-up and now I wear it at the weekends. It makes me feel prettier and mascara makes my eyes show up,’ says Alex. Mum Lisa, 36 a former nurse who now looks after her children full time, lets them wear make-up but worries the girls are growing up too quickly.

‘I’d like them to stay younger for longer, but it’s not going to happen. They are influenced by twenty-something fashion everywhere they look – from the American programmes they watch on tv, to magazines and advertising all around. If I shut them in a room and let them dress themselves I think it would be utterly shocking.’

Helen Haste, professor of psychology at the University of Bath, says children emulate role models. Unfortunately, our society may now be presenting them with unsuitable models in the form of Bratz and sexualized pop videos.

However, she says that sexy clothes may send provocative signals to adults but it’s just innocent mimic play for young girls. ‘They see it as playing, dressing up. But to an observing adult it can send out a sexual message that makes them vulnerable, in their total innocence, to predators.’

‘It’s fun for preteen girls to mess around with lots of make-up and high heels at home – it’s an adult skill that they want to acquire,’ she says. But she suggests that if the look they prefer is Geisha-caked make-up and sexy heels, it’s probably best to let them experiment at home rather than out in public.

Some preteens now look so much like twenty-somethings they can attract unwanted male attention. Cheryl Pennell, 42, from Norwich, was appalled when a man in his twenties tried to chat up her 10-year-old daughter Georgia – mistaking her for a much older girl.

Georgia loves make-up and skinny jeans. She has two piercings in each ear and loves large diamante earrings or hoops. Pop star Rhianna is one of her role models and many of her clothes are passed down from her 20-year-old aunt.

Cheryl admits it is a struggle to contain her daughter’s enthusiasm for grown-up fashions. ‘I try to make her look 10, but it’s hard. I certainly don’t let her wear low cut tops and we don’t let her out on her own in the evenings.

‘We keep a close eye on her, but she’s still been asked if she wants a drink bought for her and the other day a van-load of men were all leering at her. People think she’s a lot older, a teenager. Georgia owns a pair of towering four-inch glitter stilettos, but so far she’s only allowed to use them for dressing up at home.

With cavorting pop princesses and sexually-aggressive plastic-dolls setting the tweeny sartorial agenda in their leather outfits, towering heels, bare midriff and butt-tight jeans, the era of primary age girls happily kitted out in comfortable brogues, frocks and cardigans is long gone.

I have spent these past months tut tutting at my daughter’s passion for heels and bemoaned the passing of traditional 1950s girlswear. But, eventually I concluded that it’s better that my daughter aspires to be a feisty go-getter like Rhianna rather than Anne from The Famous Five – the meek no-hoper I wanted to be when I was her age. As long as she mimics within my controlled limits and that most definitely means no stack heels or caked make-up out in public.

Indeed, Enid Blyton’s modestly attired character represents the mythical ideal of girlhood dressing, with her hand-knitted cardigans and floral dresses. Anne may have looked sweet and innocent, but she’s still no role model either and could inspire nothing in my daughter but life as a timid, helpmeet.

These days a girl needs a little more than that if she’s to tackle the complexity of the modern world. She also needs to be vaguely fashionable if she’s to stay comfortable among her peers. Hmmm. With this in mind, I’ve decided to let my nine-year-old have a modest pair of wedge pumps and some silver sandals for birthday parties with an unassuming heel.

I have also handed her a copy of the Boden catalogue, with its funky fashion trainers in primary colours, rather than the web address to Barratt’s shoes. She would love some spiky heeled boots and pierced diamante earrings, but while I hold the purse strings no pester power will budge me on these. And thankfully, as I write this, she is barefoot in the garden, in a fairy costume from the dressing up box. You are only nine once and there’s a lifetime ahead to teeter in foot-cramping high heels…