She lives alone. She has a horse on the porch and a suitcase full of gold coins. She is nine years old and has absolutely no interest in being told what to do by anyone.
Astrid Lindgren created Pippi Långstrump in 1945 for her daughter, who was ill and asked for a story about a girl who was entirely her own person. Lindgren obliged with something that turned out to be considerably more radical than a bedside story: a child who was the strongest person in the world, who kept no bedtime and answered to no adult, who made up her own rules and stuck to them with cheerful consistency, and who was at all times exactly, unapologetically herself. Pippi Longstocking was not the first unconventional children's protagonist. She was, and remains, the most completely free.
What Lindgren understood — and what makes Pippi's world still feel genuinely alive nearly eighty years after it was written — is that children do not want to be protected from the idea of freedom. They want to see it embodied. Pippi embodies it absolutely: the red plaits, the mismatched stockings, the backwards shoes, the horse named Old Man, the monkey named Mr Nilsson, the Villa Villekulla with its garden full of possibility. She is not a role model in the conventional sense. She is something better: proof that things can be different if you simply decide they are.
Our Pippi Longstocking collection brings together officially licensed gifts, accessories, homeware and collectibles celebrating the world's most independent nine-year-old — for children discovering her for the first time, for adults who grew up with her, and for anyone who has ever suspected that the rules were largely made up by people who benefited from them.
She is the strongest. She is the funniest. She does not require your permission. Naturally, she is beloved.
