I’ve been super prepared in thinking about Christmas and Birthday gifts for Aviana, and one idea I had was to increase her ‘wardrobe’ with role play type dressing up costumes.  Currently she has a doctors kit, a kitchen (where she pretends to be mummy and daddy), and a till for a cashier.  She loves pretend play and is quite imaginative, so we probably don’t actually need anymore….but I thought it could be fun to expand it.  So using amazon I typed in “dress up costumes” and saw that “girls” and “boys” were separate search strings, so intrigued I tried “girls”.

Of course what do you think came up….princesses.  Of course, I’m not that surprised.

Princesses. Super heros in pink and purple (ok not so bad). Glamour girl (what is that even?!) Firefighter (cool!  But it was a boy in the picture).  Premier Chef (pink and frilly pinafore). Princess, princess, fairy. Waitress.  Princess. A surgeon (ding ding ding!  with actually a girl in the picture). Hairstylist. Princess, princess, princess. blah blah blah.  I stopped scrolling.

So I changed the search term to be boys….this is what came up

Surgeon. Knight. Army. Firefighter. Police. Pirate. Super Hero. Construction worker. Surgeon. Mail delivery. Super Hero. Police. Super hero. Firefighter. Princess (oooooh!!!!) which came before an astronaut….King. Pilot. Racing driver.

I then genericized the search term to be ‘kids’….and I got a mix of all the above, there was one picture after much scrolling with a girl in an astronaut’s costume.  I suddenly checked myself.  What did I want for Aviana?  I wanted her to have fire fighter, police and needed some inspiration for others, but I was stuck.  The only thing I put on the wish list was fire fighter.

Am I surprised? No.  But where else can I look for non-gender stereotyped costumes?

I googled, but didn’t get much.  I already follow Princess Awesome and Boy wonder for clothes that break gender stereotyping.  And I found an interesting page that lists some more companies at #clotheswithoutlimits (https://www.clotheswithoutlimits.com/) but I couldn’t find anything specific to dress up to inspire me.  Do you know a company that doesn’t gender stereotype dress-up costumes? I know Aviana can wear any costume, but wouldn’t it be nice to have something a little more balanced?