Park Slope Has A New 'Mom Uniform': Report

PARK SLOPE, BROOKLYN — If you haven't heard, Lululemon yoga pants, uggs and $500 Golden Goose sneakers are out. The latest symbol of a well-to-do Brooklyn mom is a much more bohemian, but not much less expensive, handbag strap and clog combo, The New York Times reports.

The Times has dubbed what is known as a Salt strap — or colorful, detachable handbag strap made to mix-and-match with luxury handbags — and a pair of No. 6 clogs the latest "mom uniform of Park Slope."

Women throughout northwest Brooklyn neighborhoods, and a handful of celebrity moms, have gathered their own collections of each staple accessory in various colors and styles.

But the new trend, and the versions of mom uniforms that came before it, may hold more significance than simply a fashion statement, the Times argued.

"Yet sometimes it seems that choosing to wear the same clothing as the people around us is a lot less about our materialistic desires than it is about our evolutionary development as humans," the article wrote. "Our evolutionary prehistory shows us that we needed many people to help us raise our offspring, so we surrounded ourselves with those who had similar values or who looked like us."

Wednesday Martin, a social researcher who owns four pairs of No. 6 clogs herself, told The Times that women who dress like their peer group aren't too far off from the female-dominant species of the bonobo ape.

These animals leave behind their kin to band together into new communities and fend off male aggression, Martin said.

"You can see how important it is for mothers to do this particularly when you consider how strange and isolating and depleting we have made motherhood in this culture," she told the Times. "Through very canny social strategizing, we survived as a species through affiliating with others and by making others feel like kin."

In other words, fashion can link you to the people you want to resemble and separate you from those you don't, the article said.

Read the full story here.

Photo from Mike Coppola/Getty Images.