Schoolchildren’s Obsession With Expensive Brand-Name Clothes

The Times’ fascinating and distressing coverage of “Children Who Dress to Excess” includes this quotation, “Advertising at its best is making people feel that without their product, you’re a loser. Kids are very sensitive to that.”

Are you sure that wasn’t a misquote? Shouldn’t it have read “Advertising at its worst. . . .”?

The same ad agency president goes on to explain that advertisers are aware that kids are the most emotionally vulnerable and if you can convince them that they’ll be a “dork” if they don’t splurge on your overpriced product, they’ll buy it.

How immoral can one get to spend millions of dollars undermining the self-confidence and feeling of self-worth of all the millions of kids who can’t afford expensive “designer” junk, and convincing them that they are “dorks” and “losers.”

I think we have here a new and very vicious form of child abuse.

WALT HOPMANS

Santa Barbara