CONVENTION CRASHING: MAGIC CONVENTION Dress your infant in AC/DC onesie Baby clothes are scary compared with tamer styles for teens

Friday, Aug. 31, 2007 | 10 p.m.

Consider the baby. Consider it as a fashion accessory.

An accessory infant has several advantages over nonbaby fashion items.

First, although it's considered rude or at least vapid to go up to people and demand they admire your purse or shoes, this is perfectly acceptable with a baby. Not only do people tolerate a proffered tot, they often welcome it. Indeed, total strangers will come up to you and admire your child.

Second, babies are not smart or strong enough to object to being dressed up. You can dress them in whatever silly sailor suit or born-to-be-bad T-shirt you want. Their only recourse is to spit up on it, and they were going to do that anyway. So go ahead and dress them as you like. This is about you.

Last, and best of all, people have to say that your baby looks cute or adorable or just absolutely precious even if it actually looks like a ham dropped from a great height.

True, there are drawbacks. Purses and shoes have few maintenance costs and do not cry, dribble or produce certain offensive biological odors and their accompanying messes.

Also, when you're bored with purses and shoes, you can chuck them in the closet and forget about them. The same cannot be said of babies, at least not unless you have a competent defense attorney.

Finally, babies are only baby sized for so long and will soon outgrow the cutesy little outfits you buy them.

Ah, well. Such is fashion -- fleeting.

Some examples of small child fashions spotted Thursday in the tiny baby fashion corner of the honking, 115,000-person big MAGIC fashion show at the Las Vegas Convention Center:

• An AC/DC-style black onesie that reads, “For those who are about to BA~BY, we salute you.”

• “Bindi Wear,” a line of clothes “from” Bindi Irwin, daughter of the late stingray-punctured TV naturalist Steve Irwin.

• A line of Harry Potter neckties, or, as they'll soon be known: bully handles.

• Vintage-ish concert onesies, so the whole world can know that your child would totally have been at that Black Sabbath show if only her parents had reproduced in grade school.

Speaking of onesies, let's meet the creator of one that sports the mudflap naked-lady shape, only in leopard print. Jill Russo of Orange County, Calif., owns Comfy Tots with her husband, Vito. At first, Jill was just making rocker and skull-themed clothes for her own children. But soon strangers were asking where they could buy the clothes. A company was born.

“They're all about the skulls,” says Vito. “The kids love the skulls.”

“Yeah,” Jill says, “my 3-year-old loves the skulls. She says, ‘I wanna wear my scary shirt.'”

As for the mudflap nudie shirt, Jill says she designed it for her baby son to make him look “kind of tough guy.”

“I don't like Winnie the Pooh on a boy,” she says.

Now, if you're worried that children's clothes are getting too hip and too sexualized -- and it's hard not to at a show that has a giant, blown-up magazine cover of little girl in red polka-dot bikini giving a vacant, come-hither stare -- there's always this comfort: their teenage years.

Really.

The teenager section is full of clothes that are modest and sensible, in a sixth-year liberal arts major kind of way. Full-length skirts and shirts, comfortable fabrics. This stuff should be a load off the minds of parents with teenage daughters.

Even the clothes from a company called Peekaboo Poledancing are pretty tame. Although you probably don't want to know about the portable stripper pole it sells. (“Includes Instructional DVD! Your Guide to Flaunting It.”)

Product: Squishy Companions

From Australia comes Flat Friends, stuffing-less stuffed animals made of sheepskin and other natural materials. The animals are all endangered species and their flat shape somehow makes them seem more endangered, as if their habitat has been encroached on by highways. Anyway, each one comes with an educational booklet about the threatened critter and 10 percent of the profit goes to conservation and preservation.

Creator Lina Candor of Marrickville, Australia, says, “Going from 3-D to 2-D, it's very to difficult to get it just right.”

Available at flatfriendsusa.com: $49.95 for just the animal, $54.95 with a drawstring bag, and $59.95 with a tote bag.

Spotted:

“Dead animals need love too.”

-- motto for a clothing line called Skellanimals.

Brendan Buhler can be reached at 474-7406 or at buhler@lasvegassun.com.