Megan Nicol Reed: When your son loves fashion

Tanya Carlson runway show at NZFW. Photo / Getty Images

Two barely pubescent girls, groomed to within an inch of their embryonic lives; driving here, driving there - dog to the vet, daughter to netball - I'd hardly registered the billboards. Once, waiting at the lights, I had half-heartedly entered into a feminist discourse with myself on the sexualisation of young girls, the ongoing objectification of the female form, blah-blah, dammit, I'd forgotten to pick up the dry cleaning. But just as the wonder in a child's gaze can make you stroke the snail you were about to smash, my son's wistful eagerness caused me to look again. Wow, he said. New Zealand Fashion Week; that'd be so lit.

No, I said, it's not. It's full of posers, vacuously celebrating consumerism while the world goes to hell in a handcart. And like so many of the circuses surrounding creative industries; it's a rookery of posturing and elitism. Sick, he said appreciatively.

That night I hit up some old contacts. Are there any invites floating around? Evidently they were thin on the ground. Jockey was offered up, but I knew Matilda Rice in cotton undies was not what had captured my son's imagination. He dreamed of haute couture, of Lagerfeld lording it over an Avenue Montaigne salon, of Cara Delevingne emerging from a wall of orchids. For my son is an aesthete.

Last year I read an article in GQ by a middle-aged American writer who took his 13-year-old son to Paris Fashion Week. It was called, "My Son, the Prince of Fashion", and it was a profound treatise on what it means to really understand your child. That it is not your job as a parent to hothouse them, but rather to enable them to find their niche, their joy.

I could not take my son to Paris; however I could juggle my daughter's pick-up from hip-hop class on a Wednesday night and take him down to Wynyard Quarter, to the Carlson show. Tanya Carlson designs some beautiful clothes, mostly, though, they are clothes worn by middle-aged women like his mother. Would he be disappointed? I needn't have worried. When I told him what I had planned, he hugged me with the pure pleasure he showed before he became a slightly surly, almost teenager.

He started preparing immediately. Flat-laying clothing combinations on his bed, refining, tweaking. The day of the show we applied face masks. I look like one of those really religious people, he said of his all white outfit. I need some contrast. Unsatisfied with the options in his wardrobe, he unearthed a black jacket from mine. I knotted a scarf quasi turban-style around my hair. What do you think? I asked. Cool, he said. It's like you're a stylish African woman. What earrings are you going to wear? These, I asked, holding up some big gold hoops. No, he said, it's like you're in costume now. I looked in the mirror. He was right. I put on some studs.

I know my husband would prefer our son shared his love of fishing, I know he struggles to see the point of the hours our son puts into researching a new purchase online, but I also know he remembers what it was like to be embarrassed by his father's walk shorts and socks and before we go out he will often run his outfit past our in-house stylist. While I love clothes I have always felt a little like a fish out of water around fashion people; awkward, self-conscious. But as I watched my son quietly taking it all in, his small, elated smile, I saw that these were his people. And then the show started, and his commentary was breathless and insightful. Look at that hem-length, he whispered to me. Did you see the baseball influence? What do you love about it, I asked him. Everything, he exhaled. I love everything.

Following on

Two years ago, wrote Sharon, in response to my loss of nerve while skiing, she experienced sheer terror on a ride designed for young children at SeaWorld. "Is it not possible to enjoy anything anymore," she asked. But, she said, on a more cheerful note she recently rolled down a bank at Western Springs with her young son and laughed like a drain. Mark and Dean counselled daily stretching, as the ultimate antidote to the physical process of ageing. "Don't lose your reckless streak, said Frank, "it's half the fun of life."