Pizza for boys, cupcakes for girls

What Pesch and her team found is that more than one out of every 12 clothing items they’d examined featured food in some way. And 72 percent of the clothing was coded as being either unhealthy or moderate. That fits neatly with pervasive notions about which foods are “fun!”—and which ones are less so. Pizza and cake are treats associated with comfort or celebration, while broccoli and Brussels sprouts get pushed around a plate or tossed into the trash. (Out of 3,800-plus items, only five portrayed vegetables.)

Perhaps even more striking than the number of food-based items of clothing is just how gendered they were. Pesch found that there were twice as many food-based items targeted towards girls than boys. Further, those clothes were predominantly designed with sweet foods like pastries and frozen desserts. For clothes marketed to boys, savory foods like pizza and fast food took center stage.

“We wondered if the trends in images on girls clothing being ‘sweet foods’ represented societal behavioral expectations for boys versus girls—meaning that girls are often expected to be sweet, kind, and demure,” Pesch said in an email to The New Food Economy.

But do children’s clothes shape our collective preferences and notions about gender—or is fashion simply a reflection of them? Pesch is careful to point out that the study doesn’t draw any conclusions about clothing’s effect on children’s behavior, either short-term or long-term. But she does suspect that there is a connection, one that hasn’t been sussed out yet.

“There does exist a sort of ‘genderism’ in foods,” she noted. “Certain foods in our culture are considered to be more masculine or feminine. For example, eating a steak or meat is often considered to be more masculine, whereas salads or desserts can be considered more feminine. The pictures or images we saw on clothing seem to propagate those stereotypes.”

Pesch’s study is significant because it highlights yet another way that unexamined ideas about gender crop up around us. In the past decade, products from yogurt to beer have faced ridicule for implying that even the most ubiquitous products must be tailored to women’s specific needs—something lighter, something pinker, something more saccharine. On a large-scale, it’s difficult not to interpret all the marketing as a suggestion that women reflect those characteristics, too.

Pesch tells me that she plans to more deeply research how exactly food on children’s clothing affects the way they eat. This study, after all, is just a brief glance—a snapshot of some retailer offerings over a specific period of time. Nonetheless, it gives a glimpse into the way that children’s clothing mirrors our ideas about food preferences, as well as gender. Something to chew on.