What do little girls want?

The question has inspired plenty of conjecture but way too little actual research.

Answers, mostly unpersuasive, have ranged from EZ Bake Ovens that pretended to bake cakes with hot light bulbs to extraneous anatomical bits male ones, in Freud?s view; pneumatically enhanced female ones, according to the makers of Barbie.

Finally, thank heaven, somebody?s going to the source.

The author of a children?s book, ?Ellie, The Perfect Dress for Me,? and Bonnie Jean Dresses (www.bonniejean.com) are inviting kids to submit a sketch of their ideal holiday dress.

Three winners, judged on originality and creativity, will have their original designs custom-made by the Bonnie Jean design staff. (You have to be eight years old or younger. Young at heart doesn?t count. On the other hand, if you?re a mom with a little girl, you can help if she?ll let you.)

OK, the scope of the inquiry is narrow. Questions about little girls? global aspirations will have to wait for future research projects. And cynics might suspect the contest is less a disinterested search for truth than a PR ploy.

Nonetheless, it?s a brave first step, and long overdue. It could give little girls all over America a leg up on sartorial self-determination.

You might think the people who make dresses for little girls would already know what sort of dresses little girls want. After all, don?t the dresses they don?t want end up languishing on the markdown rack?

Dresses made for older girls almost certainly do.

The problem with dresses for littler girls is that the little girls? dress customer is not necessarily and maybe not even usually a little girl.

For 21st-century girls, the dress is almost purely a ceremonial garment, something to be worn for birthday parties, family holiday celebrations and so on, heavily symbolic occasions to which adults bring all sorts of inexplicable (to eight-year-olds, anyway) emotional baggage.

The younger the girl, the more likely the decision to buy her a dress for such an occasion will be influenced by some adult?s or several adults? views of what she ought to wear and how she ought to look.

Grandmothers are prime suspects, liable to be seduced by smocking and ruffles and sweet Liberty prints. Moms, too, can suffer momentary delusions when confronted with a dress that echoes some long-buried childhood fantasy.

This paralyses the free market?s usually infallible invisible hand: Mothers and grandmothers can buy these dresses, which gives whoever?s selling them the idea that they?re on the right track even if the little girls they?re purchased for refuse to wear them.

Barbara Zeins, president of Bonnie Jean, tells a story about a friend who, after many vain entreaties, gave up on persuading her little girl to wear a lovely new party dress to a family Thanksgiving.

The little girl attended in overalls or whatever; her mother brought the party dress along and hung it on the back of the daughter?s chair ? mute testimony to the relevant grandmothers and godmothers and aunts that she?d tried to do the right thing.

But notice this: The department store buyer who picked out that dress in the first place never learned of its ultimate inglorious fate.

He only knew it sold at full price. He probably ordered a couple of hundred more the next year.

The allocators and planners who make buying decisions for children?s departments ?all these intermediaries? between what little girls might want to wear and what they end up having to choose from are not, it goes without saying, children themselves.

They may not even know any children. According to Zeins, they still say things like: ?I need 250 plaid dresses that have to cost x.?

Does anybody really need 250 plaid dresses? Zeins is dubious. She may know more when little girls start sending in their sketches. She?s ?anxious to see what really our core customers want.?

?Ellie, The Perfect Dress for Me? (www.ellieismyname.com) tells the story of a little girl who is invited to a splendiferous wedding: Her cousin Claire is marrying a debonair billionaire from Greenville, Delaware, so Ellie has no time to spare in finding the perfect dress to wear.

What she does have is the questionable benefit of far too much well-intended advice.

A precociously fashion-obsessed friend loads her down with too many accessories, her dad wants her to dress like Fred Astaire, her grandmother who looks exactly like the late Kay Graham offers a fragile heirloom dress Ellie daren?t move in or spill on, and her mom takes her to a custom dressmaker and proposes several scary possibilities before intrepid Ellie realises she needs to take things into her own hands.

A fashion diva is born: She prances off into the sunset in an outfit assembled from a favourite ballet skirt, a sparkly T, a string of pearls, pink socks and orange high-tops, an Astairish top hat with an un-Astairish feather, her dad?s cummerbund and her grandmother?s long white gloves.

(In this, the book echoes the self-determination theme of its predecessor, ?Eleanor, Ellatony, Ellencake and Me,? wherein our heroine, put off by all the nicknames friends and relations foist off on her and the unspoken expectations that lurk within each one decides she will henceforth be called Ellie and only Ellie.)

Author C.M. Rubin says that, both as a writer and as a mother, she?s committed to promoting ?independent thinking, creativity, individuality, resourcefulness ...?

A self-confessed clothes horse, Rubin also wants to nurture her young readers? sense of personal style. The book?s message, she says, is: ?The only person who can develop your style is you.?

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Write to Patricia McLaughlin c/o Universal Press Syndicate, 4520 Main St., Kansas City, MO 64111 or patsy.mclverizon.net.