Full disclosure: I don’t have children. I’m also pretty sure I still eat cereal for dinner most nights and my inability to keep house plants alive is well-documented. And yet… something has happened to me over the last few months.
I have become completely obsessed with school run fashion. Because yes, it really is the hardest wardrobe formula of them all. It all began when I realised that there’s a primary school less than five minutes’ walk from my house.
On weekdays around nine-ish in the morning (ok, usually half nine if I’m honest and I’m still wearing my pyjamas), I walk past ranks of mothers warrior-strong with their little ones wrapped hand-and-foot around their legs like commandos making their way toward the school gates. It’s brutal, people.
Brutal.
My pal Louise has three kids under seven and regularly sends me photos from the school run car park whilst she waits for her brood to totter back to her with messages like “Note to self: never wear boyfriend jeans again when you have a three-year-old! !” or “How did pit stains get here? !” Louise isn’t the tidy dresser either.
Last week she sent me a photo of herself taken shortly after dropping off the kids wearing black joggers, a jumper with a rather large hole in it, and a hoodie. Oh, and flip-flops.
It was October. She dubbed this get-up her “I give up” outfit but still looked incredible. Something else was going on…
To rock school run style, your clothes essentially have to be kidnapped-proof, sippie-cup-proof, rain-proof, lunch-box-residue-proof. And yet you still want to FEEL like yourself, not someone’s mum who’s been replaced by some ghastly human caricature (all double chin, tired eyes, askew hat yard sale riches). Couple all that with the feeling that yes, this might genuinely be the only human contact you have all day so ultra-metafail is not an option, and you’re getting close to IMPOSSIBLE.
So I decided to pay attention to the parentals who consistently nailed it and spotted a pattern. Being “basic AF” isn’t necessarily their vibe. Rather than being full-on branded every waking stitch of clothing, it’s the parents who have mastered dressing chic yet functional you want to grab lunch with.
Mind = blown. Jackets. Jackets are everything, apparently.
Or at least that was Louise’s enlightened takeaway from months of school-running mum dialogue. Kids = sandpaper hands which equals transfer of aforementioned sand, along with unknown, but definitely brown and crunchy substances from all over their clothes to yours in the time it takes to say ERIC HUNTER WINCEY-IT’S-MY-DOG!!. Solution?
Invest in a coat you can chuck in the wash. Louise made the mistake of buying a lush wool number and ended up with a brown stain shaped uncannily like Australia on her sleeve. Extensive research (aka googling “best coats” for hours on end whilst procrastinating from my “actual” work) has led me to believe that brand Seasalt is where it’s at right now.
They do awesome weatherproof jackets in lots of pretty colours that are definitely better at camouflaging beasties than black, although that might just be my geriatric mind deceiving me? Anyway, apparently they’re also washable and have mammoth pockets. Louise swears by the turquoise one she got and chuck throws in the wash weekly.
If bold is too much, it’s common place around here-sville to see the same long black jacket from Rains on at least five mums walking the same trio of offspring to said school. One piece clothing = fewer things to think about amiright? Enter jumpsuits.
Championed by the likes of mother-of-two and actual style icon Natasha Wilkins, they’re basically the whole outfit in one go (saving you time faffing around with decisions on trousers vs skirt vs shorts while attempting to simultaneously unzip a clingy onesie). Brands like Hush do them in jersey fabric so they don’t crease and have pockets. The mother load (pun intended) Louise bought three different colours of the same style last year and refuses to be seen without them.
I borrowed hers to wear once for brunch and instantly fell in love. It felt like lounging about but had me looking like the chic AF mama I’m not. Wide-leg trousers with an elasticated waist are another WFH wardrobe favourite to deploy for battle stations at the school gates.
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COS do really nice ones that look like smart trousers but are basically yoga trousers masquerading as something with tailoring. Throw on a stripey tee and, as learnt from aforementioned @natashalovessaturday mornings, you’ve got instant je ne sais quoi mum-from-Marseille vibes, even if you spent half the night sitting anxiously awake listening to your child’s erratic breathing, certain that monsters were crawling under her bedroom door. Ah stripes.
Where would we mothers be without thee? An OG Breton top is basically your armour against awkward while also subconsciously letting everyone know that you have your shit together despite yourchilddecidedyouscreamedumpdumpallovertheirnewshirtthismorning. The Saint James ones are worth investing in but honestly they do good ones at H&M too that you won’t cry over if they inevitably end up with puréed pear on them for the rest of time.
Trainers. They’re great, right? SO easy.
Till some genion of five shuffles past and upends half a litre of murky brown rainwater all over them. Opt instead for something smarter and easier to wipe down. Chelsea boots are genius.
No laces to tierats. (Or untie, let’s be honest) and they work with pretty much everything. Louise has a pair of Blundstones she’s had for years and despite dropping them during the weird in-between season where grass mudsplashes onto them from every direction known to mankind twice a day every day for the past three years, they still look pristine. This is possibly the most challenging bag category of all.
Trying to cram water bottles, snack pots, fruit pouches, PE kits, breakfast bowls, home folders, yoga mats and your own bag into one mammoth stride beast is asking much of anyone. FYI having watched parents grab children on one side, scooters on the other, hold onto their sanity with their teeth, all whilst manning an ongoing assault of bags ranging from backpacks to handbags to trolleys means those Fjällräven Kanken backpacks are bloody genius. They wash down like a dream, come in awesome colours, and aren’t “baby” bags with padded shoulders and sick flaps.
Louise’s bright green one has seen some stuff but still looks like she chose it for her and not the other way around. I was dubious about the dress-over-trousers trend at first, but actually gets you thecoverage to run after your ankle-biting offspring should they decide to break for it whilst simultaneously giving off serious “I woke up and threw this together even though I actually spent ages picking it out” vibes. H&M and Boden both do some nice longer/ tuniciI style dresses that work well over leggings or skinny trousers.
It also works brilliantly for our British schizophrenic climate – easy layers on and off whatever the weather throws at you. Another observation I’ve made is how many trends from within this community seem to propagate themselves. Started noticing one mama rocking a red puffer jacket a few weeks ago and now there are at least half a dozen I’ve seen on different people wearing the same damn jacket.
Same thing happened with leopard print ankle boots phase two winters ago. We share outfits via our kids and apparently that cuts right across every demographic. Work it, parents.
Whatsmore, a lot of parents seem to have found some sort of capsule ‘uniform’ rather than care about fleeting trends. Some go full keep-it-simple-with-me, others pile on the colour and clashyness. The thing they tend to have in common is that they wear the same sorts of things all the time, and – annoyingly – actually fit them.
Something as simple as your body changing shape (Helloooooooo Pilates!) or not having hours to sift through rack after rack of clothes in peace means we often wear stuff that doesn’t fit 100%. Duh.
Louise clued me into the fact that the game changer for her was taking 10 minutes before bed the night before to decide what she was going to wear. “Trying to get ready in the mornings when you have toddlers is DIY style disaster written all over.
Half the time you spend flinging items of clothing at each other until the dreaduniform sticks and you can get out the door,” she explained.
Now she has sort of a rota – jumpsuit Monday, dressovertrousers Tuesday and so on. Taking the guesswork out of a portion of your morning means you’ve got one less thing to think about when you’re already dropping yourself into melt-downtown every.single.morning.
This obsession with school run fashion has taught me that just because these parents are dealing with soggy-sticky-hand-shirt-soiling-duplicity daily doesn’t mean they don’t care about how they look. If anything, I think they care WAY more. They’re just dressi g for the worst-case-scenario (we all could take note of that tbh).
Plus, they also look like they have their sh*t together. Which is basically why we all get dressed in the morning, right? PS To all the savvy parents wrestling toddlers out there in humankind, fighting the good fight one bib-at-a-time; you are warriors.
And honestly? You guys are killing the fashion game. The rest of us suck by comparison.
