Glamour Babes

The 3-year-old tugs a pink-rhinestoned tiara off a shelf.

"We already have a tiara at home, remember?" Michelle says. "From when you did the beauty pageant?"

"It doesn't have the glitter," says the little girl.

For their makeovers, some girls choose tiaras instead of headsets, or they choose hair extensions. So many ways to be a girl! Some choose princess dresses the color of Easter eggs instead of rock star outfits, perhaps because mom is squeamish about showing so much skin. They come here for the makeover parties, which start at $21.50 per girl, and they stay at least an hour, and they buy. They mix and bottle their own skin- and hair-care products. They head over to the corner known as Pooch Parlor, pick out miniature stuffed dogs, dress them in miniature T-shirts that say things like "The Royal Heiress," and carry them in "couture" dog carriers, just like Paris Hilton.

The Pooch Parlor is less than a month old. According to Monica Blaizgis, the "Princess of Royal Relations" at the company's headquarters in Chicago, the minds at Club Libby Lu drew inspiration from "the little dog as kind of the trendy accessory in Hollywood."

The whole store seems pilfered from the pages of Us Weekly magazine -- the clothes cheap, shrunken versions of what real starlets might wear. (We imagine we might see Scarlett Johansson here if only the clothes weren't so small.) Libby Lu's market, girls between 5 and 12, is both fickle and lucrative. Pop culture keeps the store's merchandise fresh.

Six years ago, there was only one Club Libby Lu. This year alone, the company plans to open six more. This particular location in Tysons, according to a store manager named Karen Johnson, is "booked up every Saturday and Sunday, mostly, until June."

The company Web site has a "starlet contest" and a Wheel of Fame & Fortune that answers questions like, "Will i be famous?" It has a wish list that girls can fill out with several categories: "want," "need," "have to have."

Why do little girls have to "have to have" what they have to have? Is it just the ritual of dress-up, enacted in basement playrooms since there was such a thing as lipstick, and no doubt long before? (And if it is, is dress-up the same when all these grown-ups are watching?)

Is this business of pretend headsets and pants so low the waistbands of little girls' underwear shows -- is this business a girl's fantasy or is it a marketer's fantasy? Would little girls be as satisfied to dress up like 19th-century frontier women? Would they be content to play clowns?

Club Libby Lu sells the particular fantasy of a culture that has given itself over to klieg lights and red carpets, to cheap celebrity and expensive childhoods, to girls who dress like women and women who act like girls.

Meanwhile, "Who Let the Dogs Out" plays on the store's stereo system, and a little girl holds her freshly painted nails out and sings feebly, "Who-who-who-who."