Parents are gravitating toward neutral hues that match their minimalist tastes; ‘I don’t think many kids’ favourite colour is beige’
4 min
Krissy Kyne, a 27-year-old makeup artist in San Antonio, is giving birth to a baby boy this week. The room waiting for him at home is neither blue nor pink, but beige.
It has a light-coloured wood crib, a woven jute rug, a latte-hued changing pad and a cream ottoman, with oatmeal throw pillows and camel muslin blankets strewn about. Ms. Kyne said her mother-in-law told her her taste for neutrals looked “sterile,” but she has committed to the aesthetic, stocking drawers with beige onesies, beige sweatsuits and beige socks.
Ms. Kyne joins a wave of parents eschewing bright and stereotypically gendered colours for kid wares, and instead choosing earthy, neutral tones aligned with minimalism. It’s a look TikTok satirist Hayley DeRoche has termed “sad beige,” but some see it as a happy development: The ecru, blond and brown products fit right in with their stylishly muted décor in the rest of the house.
“Our whole house isn’t changing because we have kids,” said Jen Atkin, a celebrity hairstylist and entrepreneur in Los Angeles known for working with the Kardashians—although she conceded that the aesthetic can invite stains. Because she has two kids and three dogs, she bought easy-to-clean beige outdoor rugs and couches for her home.
Kylie Jenner showed off the beige furnishings in her son Wolf’s nursery in a video from March. Caitlin Covington, a content creator in North Carolina known online as “Christian Girl Autumn,” often dresses her daughter in brown and ecru ensembles for portraits.
“I’ve been influenced by influencers,” said Amina Kadyrova, a mother of three in New Jersey. “I’m a victim of the marketing system. But I genuinely like it.” Neutral colours are easier to mix and match on kids, she added.
Earlier this year, Baby Gap created a designated beige section inside some stores after researching market trends, according to the brand’s head designer, Carolyn Koziak. A new line from Walmart, Easy Peasy, includes a lot of beige, too. According to Etsy, searches for beige kids clothes jumped 67% in the past 12 months compared with the previous period.
“It seems to be marketing this fantasy that if I buy neutrals, my children will also be neutral, calm and quiet,” said Ms. DeRoche, the TikTok user, who lives in Petersburg, Va.
Most children’s companies still sell lots of toys and clothes in bright and inviting primary colours. “It’s important to expose kids to learning colours to help them with their visual perception,” said Ann-Louise Lockhart, a pediatric psychologist in San Antonio. “Having variety is important for brain development.”
Amanda Gummer, a neuropsychologist and children’s play expert in Britain, said there isn’t evidence that colourless toys stunt developmental milestones. Still, Dr. Gummer said, “the motivation of having an Instagrammable house and not letting kids explore and make a mess worries me. I don’t think many kids’ favourite colour is beige.”
Ms. Atkin said her children can get their colour fix elsewhere. “My son will go to indoor gymnasiums, play centres, museums, and he gets covered in slime and goo, and colour and glitter,” she said. “We do that outside of our house, and then we get to come home to a nice, calm, clean environment.”
Other parents noted the pacifying nature of neutrals. “Brown and beige make me feel calmer,” said Maddie Berna, a photographer and mother of two in central California. “I personally don’t like super bright colours, and they do wear that sometimes, but it’s annoying to see all the time.”
Ms. Berna’s mother, Ashley Durham, isn’t a fan.
“All of Ellie’s bows are the same kind of beige and I would like her to wear something that sticks out more,” she said, referring to her 15-month-old granddaughter. “I do try to buy them brighter color clothing. I just never see them in it.”
Naomi Coe, a California-based interior designer specialising in kid’s rooms, said she experienced an influx of beige requests during the pandemic, when many parents were spending more time at home.
“Neutral is going to give you calm, serene, homey, cozy,” she said. “I’ve noticed a shift where people are after that feeling more.”
Laura Roso Vidrequin, founder of secondhand kids-clothing marketplace Kids O’Clock in London, said beige products sell three times as fast as other colours on the site—perhaps because they are gender-neutral, she said, hence easy to pass down.
Elizabeth Robles Jimenez, a mother of four in Downey, Calif., said she bought plenty of pink and princessy products for her first three daughters before settling on beige décor and wooden toys for her 2-year-old, Ava.
“I think whites and creams give her an opportunity to discover her own self and not have the mentality that because she’s a girl, she needs all pink,” Ms. Robles Jimenez said.
Mushie, a startup that makes pacifiers, bibs and stacking cups in beige hues, has seen double-digit growth this year, according to its chief executive, Levi Feigenson. Moms cited the labels Oat, Soor Ploom, the Simple Folk, Tiny Cottons, Jamie Kay, Nora Lee, Rylee + Cru as others with an abundance of beige products.
“When I started my company [over 10] years ago, you couldn’t get a baby or child garment in a neutral colour unless you went to Europe,” said Marissa Buick, the Brooklyn founder of kidswear brand Soor Ploom. Her colour choices reflect ones “you won’t find in a shop, but are in nature,” she said.
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No trip to Singapore is complete without a meal (or 12) at its hawker centers, where stalls sell multicultural dishes from generations-old recipes. But rising costs and demographic change are threatening the beloved tradition.
6 min
In Singapore, it’s not unusual for total strangers to ask, “Have you eaten yet?” A greeting akin to “Good morning,” it invariably leads to follow-up questions. What did you eat? Where did you eat it? Was it good? Greeters reserve the right to judge your responses and offer advice, solicited or otherwise, on where you should eat next.
Locals will often joke that gastronomic opinions can make (and break) relationships and that eating is a national pastime. And why wouldn’t it be? In a nexus of colliding cultures—a place where Malays, Indians, Chinese and Europeans have brushed shoulders and shared meals for centuries—the mix of flavours coming out of kitchens in this country is enough to make you believe in world peace.
While Michelin stars spangle Singapore’s restaurant scene , to truly understand the city’s relationship with food, you have to venture to the hawker centres. A core aspect of daily life, hawker centres sprang up in numbers during the 1970s, built by authorities looking to sanitise and formalise the city’s street-food scene. Today, 121 government-run hawker centres feature food stalls that specialise in dishes from the country’s various ethnic groups. In one of the world’s most expensive cities, hawker dishes are shockingly cheap: A full meal can cost as little as $3.
Over the course of many visits to Singapore, I’ve fallen in love with these places—and with the scavenger hunts to find meals I’ll never forget: delicate bowls of laksa noodle soup, where brisk lashes of heat interrupt addictive swirls of umami; impossibly flaky roti prata dipped in curry; the beautiful simplicity of an immaculately roasted duck leg. In a futuristic and at times sterile city, hawker centres throw back to the past and offer a rare glimpse of something human in scale. To an outsider like me, sitting at a table amid the din of the lunch-hour rush can feel like glimpsing the city’s soul through all the concrete and glitz.
So I’ve been alarmed in recent years to hear about the supposed demise of hawker centres. Would-be hawkers have to bid for stalls from the government, and rents are climbing . An upwardly mobile generation doesn’t want to take over from their parents. On a recent trip to Singapore, I enlisted my brother, who lives there, and as we ate our way across the city, we searched for signs of life—and hopefully a peek into what the future holds.
At Amoy Street Food Centre, near the central business district, 32-year-old Kai Jin Thng has done the math. To turn a profit at his stall, Jin’s Noodle , he says, he has to churn out at least 150 $4 bowls of kolo mee , a Malaysian dish featuring savoury pork over a bed of springy noodles, in 120 minutes of lunch service. With his sister as sous-chef, he slings the bowls with frenetic focus.
Thng dropped out of school as a teenager to work in his father’s stall selling wonton mee , a staple noodle dish, and is quick to say no when I ask if he wants his daughter to take over the stall one day.
“The tradition is fading and I believe that in the next 10 or 15 years, it’s only going to get worse,” Thng said. “The new generation prefers to put on their tie and their white collar—nobody really wants to get their hands dirty.”
In 2020, the National Environment Agency , which oversees hawker centres, put the median age of hawkers at 60. When I did encounter younger people like Thng in the trade, I found they persevered out of stubbornness, a desire to innovate on a deep-seated tradition—or some combination of both.
Later that afternoon, looking for a momentary reprieve from Singapore’s crushing humidity, we ducked into Market Street Hawker Centre and bought juice made from fresh calamansi, a small citrus fruit.
Jamilah Beevi, 29, was working the shop with her father, who, at 64, has been a hawker since he was 12. “I originally stepped in out of filial duty,” she said. “But I find it to be really fulfilling work…I see it as a generational shop, so I don’t want to let that die.” When I asked her father when he’d retire, he confidently said he’d hang up his apron next year. “He’s been saying that for many years,” Beevi said, laughing.
More than one Singaporean told me that to truly appreciate what’s at stake in the hawker tradition’s threatened collapse, I’d need to leave the neighbourhoods where most tourists spend their time, and venture to the Heartland, the residential communities outside the central business district. There, hawker centres, often combined with markets, are strategically located near dense housing developments, where they cater to the 77% of Singaporeans who live in government-subsidised apartments.
We ate laksa from a stall at Ghim Moh Market and Food Centre, where families enjoyed their Sunday. At Redhill Food Centre, a similar chorus of chattering voices and clattering cutlery filled the space, as diners lined up for prawn noodles and chicken rice. Near our table, a couple hungrily unwrapped a package of durian, a coveted fruit banned from public transportation and some hotels for its strong aroma. It all seemed like business as usual.
Then we went to Blackgoat . Tucked in a corner of the Jalan Batu housing development, Blackgoat doesn’t look like an average hawker operation. An unusually large staff of six swirled around a stall where Fikri Amin Bin Rohaimi, 24, presided over a fiery grill and a seriously ambitious menu. A veteran of the three-Michelin-star Zén , Rohaimi started selling burgers from his apartment kitchen in 2019, before opening a hawker stall last year. We ordered everything on the menu and enjoyed a feast that would astound had it come out of a fully equipped restaurant kitchen; that it was all made in a 130-square-foot space seemed miraculous.
Mussels swam in a mushroom broth, spiked with Thai basil and chives. Huge, tender tiger prawns were grilled to perfection and smothered in toasted garlic and olive oil. Lamb was coated in a whisper of Sichuan peppercorns; Wagyu beef, in a homemade makrut-lime sauce. Then Ethel Yam, Blackgoat’s pastry chef prepared a date pudding with a mushroom semifreddo and a panna cotta drizzled in chamomile syrup. A group of elderly residents from the nearby towers watched, while sipping tiny glasses of Tiger beer.
Since opening his stall, Rohaimi told me, he’s seen his food referred to as “restaurant-level hawker food,” a categorisation he rejects, feeling it discounts what’s possible at a hawker centre. “If you eat hawker food, you know that it can often be much better than anything at a restaurant.”
He wants to open a restaurant eventually—or, leveraging his in-progress biomedical engineering degree, a food lab. But he sees the modern hawker centre not just as a steppingstone, but a place to experiment. “Because you only have to manage so many things, unlike at a restaurant, a hawker stall right now gives us a kind of limitlessness to try new things,” he said.
Using high-grade Australian beef and employing a whole staff, Rohaimi must charge more than typical hawker stalls, though his food, around $12 per 100 grams of steak, still costs far less than high-end restaurant fare. He’s found that people will pay for quality, he says, even if he first has to convince them to try the food.
At Yishun Park Hawker Centre (now temporarily closed for renovations), Nurl Asyraffie, 33, has encountered a similar dynamic since he started Kerabu by Arang , a stall specialising in “modern Malay food.” The day we came, he was selling ayam percik , a grilled chicken leg smothered in a bewitching turmeric-based marinade. As we ate, a hawker from another stall came over to inquire how much we’d paid. When we said around $10 a plate, she looked skeptical: “At least it’s a lot of food.”
Asyraffie, who opened the stall after a spell in private dining and at big-name restaurants in the region, says he’s used to dubious reactions. “I think the way you get people’s trust is you need to deliver,” he said. “Singapore is a melting pot; we’re used to trying new things, and we will pay for food we think is worth it.” He says a lot of the same older “uncles” who gawked at his prices, are now regulars. “New hawkers like me can fill a gap in the market, slightly higher than your chicken rice, but lower than a restaurant.”
But economics is only half the battle for a new generation of hawkers, says Seng Wun Song, a 64-year-old, semiretired economist who delves into the inner workings of Singapore’s food-and-beverage industry as a hobby. He thinks locals and tourists who come to hawker centers to look for “authentic” Singaporean food need to rethink what that amorphous catchall word really means. What people consider “heritage food,” he explains, is a mix of Malay, Chinese, Indian and European dishes that emerged from the country’s founding. “But Singapore is a trading hub where people come and go, and heritage moves and changes. Hawker food isn’t dying; it’s evolving so that it doesn’t die.”
