Answer: Kleenex Makes a Very Good Hat

Oh my lord, we have been busy busy busy! We’ve been racking our brains for about two weeks now, here at predicate, ink., ever since the New York Times' Style section posed the urgent question: “What’s a Girl to Wear?”. Lucky for us, the Times provides enlightenment: Reva ballerina flats ($95), or an orange sleeveless shift with printed white lace pattern and stitched ruffles ($120).

These designer duds are modeled by Eloise's supposed "modern day counterparts," who include the tiny blond in the yellow eyelet coat stomping her foot at the bellhop, the Jackie O miniature ordering room service from the hallway rotary phone, the pre-tweens on the gilded ottoman, shooting flirty looks at the be-suited little boys on the opposite ottoman (and wearing dresses by designer "Single Girl"-- because little girls should always be identified by their relationship status) and, most appallingly, the seductively pigeon-toed toddler sticking her chest out and wearing a coy come-hither glance and a rawther short dress, who poses beneath the famed portrait of Eloise that hangs at the Plaza Hotel in New York. In a narrative about contemporary little-girl fashion in which Eloise is supposedly fundamental, Eloise hovers pathetically in the background as some sort of unsubstantiated and ironically failed strain of the argument.

Here is what we love: ducks in raincoats. Here's what we hate: makeup for 6 year olds.

The fact is that the New York Times evokes Eloise, our favorite little iconoclast with a dog named Weenie, to sell really expensive snotty clothes that Eloise would never wear. Or at least never keep clean. To be honest, Times, we continue to be pretty baffled by your daily quest to maintain status as purveyor of the liberal-hip while simultaneously advertising stuff to the Madison Ave set. And to declare your next-big-phenomenon (which you just made up) by appropriating a convention-fighting character as the image paradigm for a photo shoot of conventional girlyness? Seriously??

Eloise, for those who don't know, is the 6-year old force of nature pictured at left who inhabits the Plaza hotel with a nanny and some quirktastic animals in the ubercool Kay Thompson children’s books of the 1950s. As you can see, she is enamored neither of “pastel frills” nor “clean silouhettes”. She’s got a pot belly and messy hair and unbuckled shoes and she pours water down the mail chute! The WHOLE POINT of Eloise, if we may be so bold, is that she is a precocious young girl who lives in a structured, fancy grown-up world, and who consistently interrupts that world by mimicking-- and thereby parodying-- its adult rituals. In a world that tries to make her into a little adult, she uses her egg cups (and her kleenex!) as a hat, draws on the hotel walls, and stages safari expeditions to formal Plaza dinner parties. Eloise's MO is to amuse herself in a world without traditional playmates, and the Eloise books value playing within (and thus interrupting) the system that seeks to oppress little girls precisely through the imperative of clean silhouettes. The girls in the Style section slideshow, however, are asked to sell designer clothing by molding their bodies into a picture of upper-class sexuality that is based on female submission -- with coyness, combed hair, and a hefty dose of bashful flirtation. Nowhere is this contrast more obvious than in the picture of the little girl (above) standing under the Eloise painting. There is irony in seeing Eloise -- her assertive hand-on-hip stance, childish pudge, and direct gaze -- juxtaposed with the pouty JonBenet lookalike below. Ohhhhhh, it just makes us tired, tired, tired.

I must remark at this point that Eloise has clearly had a strong graphic influence on the predicate, ink zeitgeist (I would know, since I grew up fighting over Eloise books with predicate, ink.'s creator) When Eloise skibbles down the stairs, the text often skibbles diagonally across the page. Eloise is an expert at the pithy statement of absurd fact ("Toe shoes make very good ears") and she smartly makes herself both subject and predicate in her oft repeated "I am Eloise. I am six". And the ANIMALS. Those genderless, quirky, anthropomorphized pets of hers; Skipperdee, the melodramatic turtle who eats raisins, and Weenie, the pug who wears sunglasses. Which leads me to ponder: why do we not have a turtle?!

I’m getting off track. My point is that the Times is making us get cross and develop a rash. Where Eloise puts her toe shoes on her ears, the girls of the Style section wear $95 ballet flats on their feet. Where Eloise sklanks around with an untucked shirt and goggles, adjusting the hotel thermometers, the NYT shows us a little girl with a ballerina bun, trying ever so hard to look like a lady.

Well. I think you'll have to find another paradigm, NYTimes. 'Cause Eloise ain’t no lady.