SPECIAL ISSUE ARTICLE ‘Writing’ aesth-ethics on the child's body: Developing maternal subjectivities through clothing our children Astrid Huopalainen 1 | Suvi Satama 2 1 Management and Organization, Åbo Akademi University, Finland 2 Management and Organization, Turku School of Economics, University of Turku, Finland Correspondence Astrid Huopalainen, Management and Organization, Åbo Akademi University, ASA Fänriksgatan 3 B, 20500 Åbo, Finland. Email: ahuopala@abo.fi What could we learn from the ‘aesth-ethic’ practices of clothing children? The dual focus of this article is to analyse the everyday clothing of children as well as the develop- ment of maternal subjectivities as relevant to discussions of aesthetic labour in the field of organization studies. Drawing upon the literatures on aesthetic labour and maternal sub- jectivities in the field of organization studies, we develop a fine-grained understanding of the relatively intense and effortful maternal labours that clothing our children encap- sulates. Methodologically, we use autoethnographic diary notes combined with feminist ‘memory work’ to analyse clothing as an affectual form of storytelling or ‘writing’ on the child's body that (re)produces certain sociocultural understandings about mothering, sustainability and childhood(s) in a Nordic context embraced by western con- sumerism. By considering the limitations of the approach taken to drawing wider conclusions about motherhoods, identity construction and clothing, this article advances our understanding of the development of particular middle-class maternal subjectivities seeking to problematize mass con- sumerism through childrenswear, and how idea(l)s con- cerning gender and childhood(s) are being (re)produced in and through clothing. KEYWORDS aesthetic labour, autoethnography, children, clothing, maternal subjectivities, memory work Received: 31 January 2018 Revised: 1 December 2018 Accepted: 10 July 2019 DOI: 10.1111/gwao.12404 Gender Work Organ. 2019;1–19. wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/gwao © 2019 John Wiley & Sons Ltd 1