Ringing up baby

Feb. 2, 2006 | "Babies know so little about what's going on, sweetie," says posh infant-togs designer Lucy Sykes of the new compulsion among urbanites to pamper their indifferent newborns in luxury. "It's really for the parents." A former fashion editor and socialite sister to "Bergdorf Blondes" author Plum, she has a point: To date, no infant has actually requested a $45 bottle of Burberry Baby Touch Eau de Toilette Spray. Or signaled his approval of the $1,240 Louis Vuitton Diaper bag. Or wept because Citibabes, the new private club for New York City parents with a $2,000 annual fee, declined to let him crawl into its prestigious walls. Still, as Sykes, who describes her fall/winter line as perfect for "a nice baby tea at the Carlyle Hotel," confesses, "A lot of my Manhattan friends are spending so much on their babies they can't afford to go out for dinner anymore!"

While wealthy parents like these are forced to forgo necessities like peekie toe crab appetizers, the kids upscale product industry has been raking in an estimated $45 billion annually. Why the boom? As more U.S. moms wait until their relatively affluent 30s to give birth and race to give their offspring every possible competitive advantage, 30,000-square-foot "baby superstores" (such as the delicately named Buy Buy Baby), Euro-tot boutiques, and "educational" software companies are proliferating to suck up that affluence as efficiently as the $200 Whisper Wear Hands-Free Double Breast Pump extracts milk.

The lengths to which the baby industrial complex will go to exploit these avid parental consumers is surreal. Foreign language institutes in the well-heeled suburbs of Westchester County, near Manhattan, eagerly teach infants as young as 6 months old 11 different languages. Parents can skip the Mandarin class, of course, if they've managed to outbid the competition for a rare Chinese-speaking nanny -- crucial in case their babies show an early interest in controlling the new global economy. (Sadly, according to the San Francisco Chronicle, Bay Area parents increasingly have to make do with an Ethiopian or Eritrean caregiver, or even a passi Laotian.)

Anxious to inculcate your baby with a taste for minimalist European appliances? Fifty bucks can get you a 10-inch-tall replica of a Miele stove or washing machine. Why not a baby cot designed by Phillipe Starck? A $650 modernist doll house with its own garden and pool house? You may even be tempted to spring for a crib that vibrates soothingly -- a must for rattled infants who've been forced to take their first obesity-preventing swimming lesson, as the Daily Telegraph (London) reports, when only1 day old. If baby rejects such robotic lulling, a $100 "Why Cry" gadget, the world's first patented baby cry analyzer, will announce in just 20 seconds whether her wails indicate that she's "annoyed, bored, hungry, sleepy ... showing signs of stress/colic" -- or simply appalled by her parents' gullibility.

Perhaps most ludicrous of all: The people behind the Posh Tots catalog -- one of dozens targeted at spendthrift parents -- have seen fit to combine the uniquely incompatible words "child" and "chandelier," hawking 91 variations of this nursery must-have, from the folksy "Cow Over the Moon Chandelier" ($630) to the Classic Crystal Chandelier ($1,230), a miniature masterpiece of pretension.

Even the normally imaginative designer Marc Jacobs, who recently unleashed $400 cashmere baby hoodies on the planet, has said: "I can't imagine any of my friends not wanting to spoil their kids rotten." Try harder, Marc.

Yet signs of a growing baby-luxury backlash are appearing. A New York Times piece about $900 sidewalk-hogging Bugaboo strollers here. Exasperated posts on mothering blogs there. Pointedly irreverent books, such as "The Three-Martini Playdate: A Practical Guide to Happy Parenting," are openly mocking moms and dads who over-coddle. When Jeff Howe and Alysia Abbott, an expectant Brooklyn couple, were searching for baby names last summer, Howe dismissed several of Abbott's suggestions -- Spencer, Sebastian, the admittedly indefensible Willem -- with a weary: "Too Bugaboo." Which is to say, "too ubiquitously yuppie." One senses they're not alone.

One senses, too, that they'd be equally troubled by Cookie, the new shopping/lifestyle magazine for upscale parents, a distractingly beautiful title that favors $115 toddler haircuts and unapologetically JonBenet-ish photos of preschoolers fiercely clutching "mom's" $2,300 purse. With its debut issue, editor in chief Pilar Guzman, a frank, incisive woman who says things like "booze becomes a big friend in the early years of parenting," made a valiant effort to walk the line between "aspirational" and "galling," with several nods toward affordability. But as she puts it, "My readers want to curate a certain lifestyle for themselves that isn't necessarily the norm." So true: The magazine suggests you buy your kids single stock shares, conveniently framed, to hang in their rooms.

The New York Observer called Cookie "horrifying." Fortune implicated it in what's being called "the prince and princess syndrome." A reviewer on bloggingbaby.com, the popular blog for moms, seemed to agree: "Cookie had me gagging on my tongue and shrieking ... my husband calmed me down by reminding me that, "We're middle class. We're just middle class, it's okay. This isn't targeted at you." Another scornful mom posted: "[The magazine] seems to reflect a one-upmanship that's been going on in the parenting world." The sole pro-Cookie comment -- "Do you know how nice it feels to dress your child in $200 boots, a $300 outfit, and a $400 coat? You feel honestly proud" -- was slammed by a queasy poster: "You should feel honestly ashamed."

Next page: "Together we can change the baby world one top-notch store at a time," says one blogger