The big baby clothes scam!

I read with interest - and mouth ajar in disbelief - recently of a woman who had spent close to £100,000 on clothes and nursery equipment for her as yet unborn baby daughter. Oh, so proud was she of the £1000 babygrows and designer outfits she'd neatly hung in her newly acquired wardrobe (no doubt hand carved from a Giant Redwood that had been cut down by loin-clothed tribesmen to serve the infant storage needs of Mrs Spendalot), that she felt it necessary to share her extravagance with the world.

'Nothing but the best' was clearly her motto as the lady in question set about preparing for her new arrival.

Now, I don't wish to criticise a mother's love for her baby - and this lady clearly loved her bump enough to keep Louis Vuitton afloat by herself - but something does niggle with me when parents spend ridiculous sums on things for their children, for three simple reasons:

1. The children don't know what they're wearing and couldn't care less anyway
2. You can buy, borrow and/or recycle great clothes for next to nothing, and...
3. Even a Christian Dior babygrow can get covered in poo 30 seconds after it's put on!

In my opinion baby snobbery is alive and well in this country, so much so that shopping at Mothercare and Baby Gap would be, to people like our extravagant new mum, akin to sourcing your cooking ingredients from the bins at the back of Netto, instead of Waitrose!

Not the done thing, darling, not the done thing.

However, there is clearly a market for haute couture babywear, and who can blaim the designers? Fifty pence on a tiny bit of material, 10 minutes on a sewing machine and...voila...a £500 outfit! But, remove the label, stick the same item in a Tesco wrapper and you can sell eight of them for a fiver. What a con.

As for Mrs Spendalot, I just hope that fate will one day bring Spendalot Jr and my own son together - ideally at a messy playgroup - where I will take great satisfaction from watching Baby B practise hand printing on the latest Vivienne Westwood infant masterpiece.