THE PREGNANCY POSERS
pREGNANT women are a fine sight. What could be more triumphant than the great belly proudly borne, like the spinnaker of a great yacht racing before a following breeze?
Here’s a miraculous female body performing its everyday magic trick of growing a new person, carrying a baby safely into the world. Here’s a mother in the making, too: a compact package of determination to love and protect. All in all, it’s a beautiful vision — perhaps even more so when the woman was a beauty already.
But something strange is happening to the idea of the pregnant look. It is as if that sense of triumph and completion is no longer enough. The trend set by celebrities and red- carpet role models is to hammer home the message that even in the last trimester of pregnancy it is a woman’s duty to be foxy and alluring.
And not just for the man who loves her and looks forward to the birth of their baby — but for every goggling lecher who likes to look at women’s bodies.
The break- out began demurely enough 26 years ago, with Hollywood actress Demi Moore posing naked on the cover of Vanity Fair magazine in 1991, bump swelling below the coy gesture photographers call a ‘hand bra’. I was rather in favour of that because it felt like a simple statement that pregnancy is natural and beautiful. And perhaps even sexy.
But now things have moved on, and ‘ sexy’ has been shoved to the fore. Famous pregnant women now seem to feel that it is vital to carry on posing in ultra-tight, leave-nothing-to-the-imagination dresses and, amazingly, high heels — almost right up until giving birth.
Last month, supermodel Rosie Huntington-Whiteley stepped out wearing a distinctly unforgiving, off-the-shoulder bodycon dress — slashed to the upper thigh — teamed with a pair of vertiginous strappy sandals.
NO SURPRISES there, I suppose — she is a Marks & Spencer lingerie model, worth an estimated £5.6 million. But it says a lot about how we value women that not even an impending due date — a first child with Hollywood hard man Jason Statham this summer — makes her feel permitted to give up the glamour model look.
Of course, the gloomy secret that all mothers know is that unless you have a rare stick-insect physique, real women get pregnant all over. And that includes the ankles.
In the later stages of pregnancy, flat shoes or very small wedges are all most women can manage. Indeed, the best most of us can hope for is not to waddle.
Yet despite their burgeoning girth, many a pregnant celebrity feels obliged to clamber into 4 in spike heels. And while you might expect it from Kim Kardashian, model Abbey Clancy and a fashion designer such as Victoria Beckham, tottering in one’s third trimester is by no means confined to those more known for their bodies than brains.
Even the international human rights lawyer Amal Clooney and the businesswoman (and ex-PM’s wife) Samantha Cameron have felt compelled to pull off the pregnant-in-heels look.
Of course, when it comes to the rest of an A-lister’s blossoming body, anything goes. Anything, that is, except for a forgiving smock or a comfortable oversized T- shirt. Thus we have Beyoncé announcing her most recent pregnancy by thrusting her twin-packed belly over a sort of gilded pubic tiara complete with thigh- chains; here she is again parcelling it in tight, sweaty red lurex.
This week, she shared a video online showing her ever-expanding bump in all its glory, wearing a semi-sheer fitted black T-shirt and leggings.
While expecting her youngest child, Saint, now 17 months, Kim K unaccountably decided the most fetching look for the later months of pregnancy was a seethrough, black lace jumpsuit.
And while the footballer’s wife Rebekah Vardy may have lately endeared herself to the sisterhood by revealing the saggy — normal — truth about her ‘mum tum’, she was just as guilty of sexy-pregnancy bragging before the littlest Vardy arrived earlier this year, appearing at the BBC Sports Personality Of The Year Awards in December in a tight black number set off with towering silver heels that would have left most pregnant mortals reaching for the Gaviscon.
The downside of all this celebrity pregnancy bragging, of course, is that it makes the rest of us feel pretty lousy by comparison. Many of us have babies when we’re older than these glamorous stars — practical constraints such as finances, the job ladder, and the reluctance of young men to settle down among the factors that affect the timings of most women’s pregnancies.
And unless you are a young, elastic and particularly lucky gym-bunny, you will never do too well in transparent lace leggings, spike heels and an ultra-tight bandeau top. Pregnant or not.
In late pregnancy, however fit and slim you are, the muscles relax (to let the baby out), some slightly wobbly fat gets stored (to ensure good feeding) and your ankles may depress you for many weeks. It is simply unkind for anyone to make you feel that sexy outfits are the norm. So
Maternity wear used to be about comfort, not sex appeal. So, asks LIBBY PURVES, why do expectant celebrities now parade in the tightest clothes and highest heels imaginable?
how did we get to a stage where pregnant women are in such denial about the changing shape of their bodies?
Of course, nobody with a brain wants to go back to the days when it was felt indecorous to go out in public once you were really showing. Thank goodness we have moved on from the Victorian era when well-conducted gentlewomen did not go out at all or dine in company in their third trimester.
By the edwardian era there was a brisk trade in maternity corsets, designed (horrors) to flatten out the guilty bump; medical disapproval wiped that idea out, though right into the seventies maternity ‘ panty girdles’ offered ‘support’, as if mere human muscles were never going to be enough to stop the whole bump descending to knee level with a crash.
Gradually, the advance of independent working women ended that sense of pregnancy being shameful, even impolite.
Maybe the way women weighed into forties war work helped. My aunt remembered how crafty they had to be during the clothes ration ( her friend sneaked some parachute silk from an American GI, and the women all swooshed around, she said, like untethered barrage balloons).
By the mid-century, screen stars and prominent women such as Jackie Kennedy had no reservations about appearing in loose, obvious maternity clothes.
since in the sixties everyone was wearing bright florals and flippy-hippie smocks it must have been a breeze, and indeed the idea of looking like a large summer flowerbed, perhaps with a white peter-pan collar to ‘draw attention upwards’, tended to dominate maternity wear in the shops for decades. But if you were an office worker you needed something less mumsy, and the rag trade stepped up boldly with discreet navy or forest-green smocks, nicely cut so that a giga-bump didn’t make them embarrassingly shorter in front than behind.
There’s a lovely picture of Princess Diana in 1982 on the Palace balcony wearing one, and looking comfortable and pretty and — unfashionable word — discreet. The Duchess of cambridge (though her hems are shorter and her heels higher) has elegantly navigated her way through both pregnancies — without becoming a poster girl for the look-at-me pregnancy brigade. Indeed most women, if they are honest, would prefer that kind of look.
so come on, ladies, let us defy this tedious expectation that every pregnant woman must be a walking self-advertisement for sexual allure right up to the moment she enters the maternity ward. Pregnant and foxy should not be a default fashion setting.
for actually, the very brashness of this look works directly against one of the most satisfying and unique parts of being with child: that secret privacy of carrying a beloved creature, feeling little kicks and tremors, nurturing a marvellous life.
Knowing — even accepting gladly — that it is no longer all about you, and your vanity and allure. It’s about the baby. And that, as any mother knows, feels good.