After two years of making girls’ dresses featuring designs including mathematical symbols and dancing ninjas, the two women behind a US firm that aimed to fight back against the hegemony of pink found they were struggling to meet demand.



Showcasing graphics designed by rocket scientist Elishka Jepson, Princess Awesome dresses were created by Eva St Clair and Rebecca Melsky for “a different kind of girly girl because girls shouldn’t have to decide between dresses and dinosaurs, or ruffles and robots”.

You can’t beat sexism with dinosaur dresses | Letters Read more

At the start of the month they launched a campaign on fundraising site Kickstarter, with the aim of raising $35,000 (£23,000) by 5 March to begin factory production. Within three days they had raised the full amount. By Thursday, 2,171 backers had pledged $137,084, making it by far the highest-funded children’s clothing project in Kickstarter history.

“It’s been an incredibly exciting two weeks,” said St Clair. “I think it shows that parents and children alike are rejecting the gendered straitjacket that mass consumer cultures forces them into.

“Our dresses let girls climb trees, express their interest in dinosaurs, robots, trucks and airplanes – and be princesses,” she said. “The demand for clothing that lets girls be girls of every variety is there, but the supply is not. These things simply don’t exist in stores.

“This matters for so many reasons. When people meet a little girl in a pink, sparkly dress, they talk to her about how sweet and pretty she looks. If she’s wearing a dress with robots or trains on, they’ll talk to her about them instead – that is, about technology or engineering. That opens up her mind, her world and her future.”

According to Rebecca Hains, author of The Princess Problem: Guiding Our Girls Through the Princess-Obsessed Years, Princess Awesome “is arguably the first serious alternative to stereotypically girly-girl dresses to enter the marketplace in recent years”.

Hains said: “Given parents’ increasing frustration with princess culture and girls’ constricted, stereotypical, pink-upon-pink ‘options’, Princess Awesome’s timing is perfect,. Perhaps it’s even the harbinger of a new zeitgeist.”

Writer Natasha Walter agreed. She said: “It does feel as though this is part of a wider change that is beginning,. Other manufacturers and shops have also been responding recently to pressure to, say, not market science toys as for boys.”

Walter’s book, Living Dolls: The Return of Sexism, will be relaunched on 8 March for International Women’s Day. In her new introduction, she talks positively about the progress that has been made over the past five years on issues including how toys and clothes are marketed to girls and boys.

Walter said: “Important changes were when Hamleys decided not to separate their toys as for girls and for boys a couple of years ago, and when Boots stopped putting science toys into boys’ toys sections. I think public pressure has had an effect – such as the campaign groups Pink Stinks and Let Toys Be Toys.

“When I was writing Living Dolls I honestly thought a lot of people would question my anger about the way we were stereotyping girls and boys but instead I found there was a massive response around wanting to see real change.”

Our dresses let girls climb trees, express their interest in dinosaurs, robots, trucks and airplanes – and be princesses Eva St Clair

Psychoanalyst Susie Orbach is more cautious. While finding Princess Awesome’s combination of dresses and mathematical equations “charming”, she said: “I wish I could say this is the tipping point against pinkification but I think it is rather the counterpoint and fightback. We haven’t won by any means yet.”

The fight against pinkification has, however, recently won some important battles: last November, Mattel pulled its Barbie book I Can Be a Computer Engineer, which featured Barbie – supposedly a computer engineer – making several technical blunders before turning to her male colleagues for help.

Last summer, Lego responded to consumer pressure and launched their first-ever set featuring female scientist figurines, including a miniature astronomer, chemist and palaeontologist. In March, a national campaign supported by publishers and authors to stop children’s books being labelled as for boys or for girls won the support of Waterstones, Britain’s largest specialist bookseller.

Last June Lib Dem MP Jenny Willott, then women’s minister, confronted toy shop owners and manufacturers at an industry summit, telling them that toys should be in categories such as science and construction rather than placed in gender-specific departments.

Her comments came after Hamleys, the London toy shop, reorganised its store after mothers complained that having a pink-coloured floor for girls and a blue floor for boys amounted to “gender apartheid” that would result in social inequality.

“It does feel like we’re on the verge of a turning point in gender clothing,” said Ruth Lopardo, co-founder of Let Clothes Be Clothes, which criticised Marks & Spencer last month for marketing a series of Natural History Museum dinosaur-themed T-shirts and pyjamas made only for boys.

Lopardo said: “We’re at an overwhelming point at the moment, where many gender-neutral things like sandpits can only be bought in pink or blue. But consumers are getting wise to what is simply a blatant tactic to force them to buy unnecessary items, and wise manufacturers are finally waking up to the fact that frustrated consumers can simply use the internet to buy toys from independent manufacturers who care about these things, or from Scandinavian countries where all colours are gender-neutral when it comes to children.”

Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett, who co-founded The Vagenda blog and is co-author of : A Zero Tolerance Guide to the Media, said there was a huge, unsatisfied demand for more subtle children’s clothing: “Parents have been crying out for anything targeted at little girls that isn’t riddled with pink glitter,” she said.

But does it matter? Caroline Criado-Perez’s campaign to gain women better representation in the British media led, in part, to the Bank of England deciding to put the image of Jane Austen on the £10 note from 2017.

Criado-Perez said: “No one is going to say that pink dresses are the most important battle that feminism has to fight. But not only is everything connected when it comes to gender equality, why is it only in feminism that people say the most egregious battles have to be fought before the smaller issues can be tackled? Of course this matters.

“When companies know they can sell gendered products, why should they bother to or risk producing non-gendered ones? You need people who actually care about the issue to change things and those are often frustrated parents.

“The reaction of the Kickstarter community in this story shows how sick parents are with only being able to buy products that force their children into ridiculous gender stereotypes. I find this tale incredibly inspiring.”