Children's Clothes Guide I

Welcome to the I section of the Children's Clothes Guide. Unlike most letters, which scatter across dozens of unrelated topics, I is dominated by a single subject: infant and toddler clothing. Thirty-four of this letter's thirty-five topics live together in the infant & toddler folder, because the words infant and toddler themselves begin with I and T and the whole baby wardrobe was filed here as one collection. The one topic outside the folder is a brand guide, children's Izod shirts.

That concentration makes I the guide's baby letter. Almost everything here concerns the first three years of life: clothes sized in months rather than years, fastenings designed for diaper changes, fabrics chosen for skin that is new to the world, and shoes for feet that may not be walking yet. If you have arrived with a newborn, a baby shower list or a fast-growing toddler, this is the letter written for you.

How This Letter Is Organized

The infant & toddler collection divides into overview pages and garment pages. The overviews look at the wardrobe as a whole, split several ways because parents shop several ways: infant clothing by itself, infant boys' and girls' apparel, clothing and fashion treated separately, toddler apparel and toddler fashion, and two combined infant-and-toddler directories. Those overview pages are deliberately angled differently - one is about the sizing system, one about garments, one about styling - so read the one that matches the question you actually have.

The garment pages then take one category at a time: bodysuits and one-pieces, rompers, jumpers, overalls and shortalls, dresses and skirts, pants, shorts and shirts, sweaters and sweatshirts, outerwear, pajamas and sleepwear, robes, socks, shoes and underwear, plus clothing sets and activewear. The original I directory carried the same honest note as the other letters: its editors admitted the list might not be complete and invited suggestions for other children's categories beginning with I, on the grounds that they were only human.

The Baby Sizing System in Brief

Baby clothes are the one part of children's clothing not sized by age in years. Labels run newborn, 0-3 months, 3-6, 6-9, 12, 18 and 24 months, then toddler sizes 2T, 3T and 4T - and the month labels are really weight and length bands in disguise, which is why two babies of the same age can wear sizes six months apart. Every garment guide in this letter returns to that system, because nearly every baby-clothes mistake is a sizing mistake: buying by the calendar instead of by the tape measure and the scale.

Growth speed is the second fact of baby dressing. A size can last twelve weeks or three, so the guides here consistently advise a small stock in the current size, a few pieces in the next, and no deep investment in any single size - advice that matters most for the gift-buyer, who should always shop a size ahead. The one-piece and bodysuit guides explain the snap fastenings that make changes fast, the pajama and sleepwear guides cover safe sleep, and the shoes guide explains why pre-walkers need soft soles and new walkers need flexible ones.

Using the I Guides Well

Start with the overview that matches your situation - infant clothing for the newborn layette, toddler apparel for the 2T-4T wardrobe - then drop into the garment guides for the items on your list. Each garment page follows the same pattern: what the garment is, its styles and construction, how its sizing actually runs, and how to wash and store it, because baby clothes are washed more than any other clothes a family owns.

The grids below list every I topic exactly once: the Izod shirts guide on its own, then the full infant & toddler collection in alphabetical order. From any page in the folder you can return here with one click, and the infant & toddler clothing sub-directory inside the folder gathers the whole collection again for browsing by garment.