Here’s a baby name theory I don’t think I’ve ever come across before:
“Something happened when children under 5 became a market, maybe around 1983, with things like Baby Gap,” said Christine Farina, associate professor of communication at the Richard Stockton College of New Jersey. “We became more conscious of each other at the same time. You wanted an upscale, slightly different name, but not too different. Gap, Williams-Sonoma, all these types of places that affected pseudo-sophistication made the difference. So that is the change from, say, Michaels and Jameses everywhere, and more Jacobs and Emmas and Joshuas.”
Christine Farina is “Stockton’s video production professor,” according to the faculty web page. I have no idea how a background in filmmaking qualifies her to talk about baby names.
And some of her dates/claims don’t match up. Joshua and Jacob were already popular in the 1970s. Michael is the #2 name in the country–still “everywhere,” I’d say. Gap didn’t launch the babyGap line until 1990. (They did have GapKids in the 1980s, though.)
Despite this, I do like her theory. Not the wording of her theory–I’m pretty sure we were all fully “conscious of each other” long before 1983–but the idea behind it. It seems plausible to me that baby name trends could be influenced by retail trends in the way she (sort of) describes.
I just wish she’d offered some solid evidence to back it up.
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One of my earliest blog posts was “Shopping for Names: Pottery Barn Edition.” (You can read it here: http://appellationmountain.net/2008/01/27/shopping-for-names-pottery-barn-edition/) Much to my surprise, it is consistently among my top posts.
It is just a list of product names from the January 2008 catalog. I’m surprised every time I see it ranked so highly – I never think to link back to it.
There’s a lot that goes into (or behind) baby names. I love names, and I have to confess, shopping trends is not one I’d thought of before. Great post!