i am not a shill: kenneth cole baby clothes

I am however happy to engage in a little bloggy-love based commerce. See what I mean in the rest of this post, below. This was written, and photos taken, over a month ago, and intended to be posted on another website, FYI…

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Your Reaction Will Depend on Your Point of Reference

Kenneth Cole makes baby clothes? A free outfit in exchange for a little review? Sign me up!

I mean, really. Kenneth Cole IS fashion, no? New York, street chic. Kenneth Cole was my first best pair of black satin kitten heels. Kenneth Cole was the first pair of hip shoes my now-husband bought on our fourth date, the will-you-help-me-redo-my-wardrobe-?-date which also included a trip to the Lucky Brand store for jeans and a shirt. (Hey Lucky — I hear you make kids clothes too. Ever heard of BlogHer?)

The day the package arrived, my teen mother’s helper was with me: a tall, blonde, ballet dancer and junior at the local alternative high school. We opened the package together, took out the three-piece ensemble: a white sweat suit with brown trim and a white, brown, beige, and blue striped onesie to go underneath.

“It looks like something my ex-boyfriend would wear!” she exclaimed, explaining that her ex is a young white boy who tends toward the hip hop vernacular and sports a “grill” on both his top and bottom teeth. In other words, K-Cole looks a little K-Fed.

My husband came home from work and spotted the outfit hanging from a chair in the dining room.

“It looks like the astronaut suit from Planet of the Apes!” he said. My husband being an avid collector of 1970s vintage action figures, big screen and small, this would be his point of reference.

I’d gotten a kind of astronaut/storm trooper hit on it also, though not as specific. The first thing I keyed into was the round blurry logo/badge thing on the left side, as if someone had taken a big-person-clothes design and simply shrunk it, without considering what the end result would look like. This is because I work in editing and am familiar with this type of graphic design snafu. With effort I could make out the words “Kenneth Cole Reaction” in the circles within circles of squigglies.

After all of our initial Reaction-s, we three agreed that while we wouldn’t necessarily want to dress an adult in this outfit, it would be cute on a baby.

The positives: I like the contrast stitching. The pockets on the butt and leg are cute. The fabric of the pants is stiff and thin, not a fluffy fleece. Good for summer. The sweatshirt is the same fabric lined with softer t-shirt material.

I’m not sure white would be my first choice if I were shopping for this in a store — I usually veer towards color, and lots of it — but I can appreciate that the greasy spit-up residue stains will be much less noticeable on it. As far as the onesie goes, I am ALWAYS a fan of stripes, and the blue-brown combo is subtle and pleasing; plus, the cotton on this piece is nice and soft and thick.

The first thing I did with the outfit, after garnering opinions, was wash it, and I don’t currently own an iron, being somewhere between lazy and not that type of girl, so you may notice some wrinkling in the photos. It would look sharper if pressed. However the wrinkles do tone down the hip-hop astronaut-ness of the garments.

The outfit is too big for him just now — a risk when getting freebies. For the sake of the pictures, I had to add shoes, and only his silver tennies, which are also currently too big, would really match. Hey, Kenneth Cole, how about some baby SHOES??? The good news is in a few months he can sport this outfit and kicks together legitimately, although he’ll always try to kick them off (see photos).

Also in the photos my boy is wearing his big bulky cloth diaper, which kind of fills up the pants in an unflattering manner. A downside to the pants that I didn’t think of until we put the outfit into action is that the stripes show through the white material; in addition, the pants don’t unsnap at the crotch. Snaps in that area make diaper changes ever so much easier.

But he does look handsome in it.

Of course we had to photograph him with the Apes.