Here’s something new to worry about: it’s not just the robots who will be taking our jobs in the digital age, it’s the tech-savvy four-year-olds.
Fashion chain J Crew has announced its latest hire: an Instagram star, aged four, who goes by the nom de plume Mayhem. The blogger’s capsule collection of children’s clothes will hit shelves in the spring.
If you haven’t heard of Mayhem, the diminutive designer has 423,000 Instagram followers and runs the blog Fashion By Mayhem with her parents. If fame at the age of four sounds a bit, well, icky, then at least Mayhem’s USP is pre-school appropriate: she makes dresses and outfits using crepe paper, plastic bags and sticky tape, often recreating looks from the catwalk and the Oscars using just her own tiny hands.
When blogger Tavi Gevinson became the toast of the style set at 13, her tender age raised a few eyebrows. Just five years later, as Instagram booms, 13 seems almost uncontroversial in fashion-star terms. Today, moodboards are created around outfits worn by Alexander Wang’s four-year-old niece, while Kim Kardashian and Kanye West’s tiny daughter, North West, is a Givenchy-clad front-row fixture.
But for J Crew this particular collaboration is based on play and creativity, rather than peacocking. As Mayhem’s mother, Angie Keiser, explained on the youngster’s blog: “Mayhem and her new crew all sat down on the floor and played. And made stuff. Out of paper and tape and beads and glue and crayons. And they laughed and hugged and had more fun than I would have imagined. And then they sprinkled their magic J Crew fairydust on it and turned paper into fabric. And when it was time to go, Mayhem cried. Because she didn’t want to leave.”
Judging from the pictures on J Crew’s website, there was plenty of thumb-sucking and sitting on laps, too. Which, as celebrity guest-designers’ creative processes go, sounds pretty standard.
