Luca and Daniel Biro, sons of Daniella Vitale, the president of Gucci America, are featured in an article in last Sunday’s New York Times, discussing their fashion preferences and favorite sartorial trends. Daniel reveals that his current look of choice is “skinny jeans and a sweater.” Luca, however, favors “chic brown pants and black sneakers.” The brothers are pictured above the article, posing casually against a window and showing off their very expensive, very spiffy outfits.

Oh, also, Luca and Daniel are six years old.

More than anything else, more than the seemingly overlooked absurdity of asking a child which brands he likes to wear and then publishing the answers in an internationally distributed newspaper, how is it possible, normal or acceptable to the New York Times , that a six-year-old boy would know what “skinny jeans” are? In a state of bemused shock, I finished the article half-hoping that Daniel might reveal what he likes to drink when he goes out to the Beatrice Inn on Friday nights. Perhaps a stiff glass of chocolate milk, straight up?

It is my observation that this precociousness in fashion sense and a desire for expensive items, while surprising, in not altogether uncommon.

Last February, I was standing outside of Barneys New York on Madison Avenue, waiting for a friend, when my eyes fell upon a 10-year-old girl wearing an enormously expensive pair of Tory Burch boots and gossiping a mile a minute with her equally juvenile friend who appeared to be sponsored by the accessories department at Chanel.

The proverbial final straw in my rising levels of astonishment was walking into my local coffee shop in California this summer and spotting an eight-year-old with an iPhone. I knew it was her iPhone because her father was also holding an iPhone and hers was covered in unicorn stickers. “What do you even use that for?” I wanted to inquire. “The calculator?”

Maybe because I am getting older or maybe because I myself do not have children, but I am aware of an increasingly greater propensity among my generation to begin sentences with the words “Kids these days.” Article upon article has recently been written about the so-called “wealthy child syndrome,” and it makes me uneasy to think that in a world where some children literally own nothing, a six-year-old is concerned with the cut of his trousers.

Having been trained by my parents in the school of practicality, I cannot fathom the mindset of a mother buying her child a pair of $200 denim jeans. He is going to rip them, stain them, grow out of them within two months. And when that time comes, he is going to want another pair, but a different brand this time, because there is already something newer, better and cooler on the market.

I find nothing wrong with wanting nice things. I myself would like to have many, many nice things, all of which are far too expensive, unessential, and would cause my father to laugh if I asked for them with a straight face. But the nicest thing of all to have had is a childhood, and nothing hit this idea more closely to home for me than reading this past Sunday about Daniel Biro and his skinny jeans.

Perhaps, like the minimum drinking age of 21, we should impose a minimum dressing age of around 17 years, which states that individuals are not allowed to concern themselves with their clothing until they can fully understand that it is not what they wear but who they choose to be that shapes their impact on the world. Otherwise, frighteningly enough, I can just see little Daniel on the playground now, not allowing the boy in the cargo pants to play with him, laughing in his face, then heading off to Bergdorf’s for some after-school browsing.

Caroline Smith is a junior in the College. She can be reached at smith@thehoya.com. The Hoya Wears Prada appears every other Friday in The Guide.