Girls' Clothing
Buy and sell girls’ clothing in Panama.
Girls’ clothes rarely wear out before they stop fitting, so most of what one girl has outgrown still has a season or two left for the next. Listings can be new or pre-owned: toddler 2T sets, everyday cotton dresses, school uniform pieces, party dresses, and the child-sized folk dresses and mola blouses worn for school folklore days. Nearly all of it carries US size labels. Sellers range from families clearing a wardrobe to boutiques with new stock, and buyers message them directly to ask for measurements before arranging to collect.
Everyday girls’ clothes and the US size label:
children’s shops in Panama stock mostly American brands such as Carter’s and OshKosh, so tags run 2T to 5T for toddlers and then 4 to 16, sometimes printed as CH, M, G and XG. Spanish brands like Mayoral label by age instead, and the two charts do not line up neatly. Ask for her height rather than trusting the number: on the Carter’s chart a G (8/10) fits a girl of roughly 128 to 140 cm. A dress with adjustable straps or a smocked bodice buys an extra season; a fitted blouse does not. Sandals and school shoes are under girls’ shoes.
Folk dress, molas and Ngäbe dresses in girls’ sizes:
Panama’s national dress, the most Panamanian thing in her wardrobe, is a blouse and a long, full skirt worn over petticoats. The everyday folk version, in printed cotton, is the one danced at school presentations; the gala version is white cotton worked by hand in openwork, cross-stitch or cutwork appliqué and edged with handmade bobbin lace, the style Las Tablas is known for. Guna mola blouses, with hand-sewn reverse-appliqué panels front and back, are made in girls’ sizes too, and so is the long Ngäbe dress trimmed with geometric bands, which can be sewn by hand or by machine. Beaded hairpins, combs and the rest of the headdress belong in girls’ accessories.
A child’s folk dress, rented for the day or bought to keep:
many families rent. A complete cotton set of blouse, skirt and petticoat for a girl of seven to ten rents from about $25 a day, and a gala set costs a good deal more for the occasion. Buying is another scale: a hand-worked gala dress in a child’s size still costs thousands of dollars even second-hand, because the needlework takes months. That is why a well-kept gala set is worth listing once she outgrows it, and why buying mostly makes sense when a younger sister will wear it next. Everyday dresses work the other way round: end-of-season markdowns in children’s shops are steep, so a used one in good condition sells for around $10.
Leggings, party dresses, uniforms and folk dress worn before:
everyday clothes go first at the knees of leggings, the underarms of fitted tops and the waistband elastic; stretch it and let go, and if it stays wavy it has lost its grip. On a party dress, run the zip end to end and look for snags in the tulle. A uniform with one school’s crest only interests families at that school, so check how much hem is left to let down and whether the crest is embroidered or an iron-on patch that lifts in the wash. On a folk dress, look for yellowing along the folds of the white cotton and ask to see the back of the needlework: hand work shows small, slightly uneven stitches, while machine embroidery or a printed imitation looks perfectly regular. The same test works on a mola, where genuine reverse appliqué shows folded, hand-stitched edges on the back and a printed copy shows nothing.
Bundles by size, and the school name on a uniform:
families want to cover a whole size at once, so “size 6: eight dresses, three shorts sets” moves faster than single pieces. Photograph each item flat in daylight, front, back and label, and give chest width and length in centimetres. Put the school and the grades in the title of any uniform listing. For a folk-dress set, list every piece, say whether the needlework is hand or machine, and photograph it close up: a family driving in from Chitré or David to see a gala set will ask for those pictures before they set off.