How pregnancy helped me fall in love with "getting dressed" again
Creativity better flourishes in the face of constraints
One idea I dwelled on a lot while pregnant was how motherhood is often portrayed at its extremes. I am often confronted with overwhelmingly negative accounts of pregnancy, birth and motherhood. The “primal scream” of exhausted working mothers during the pandemic. Plan on giving birth in a hospital in America? Watch out for the “cascade of interventions” in which you are given hormones, then an epidural and then a C-section. In my “beyond the bump” group, which met weekly at a local community centre, we were handed worksheets about post-partum depression (bad), post-partum psychosis (very bad) and what to say to your partner so they don’t neglect you and the baby (inevitable, of course).
Yet if you want to find a rose-tinted depiction of motherhood, they are also plentiful. Babies are extremely cute! It is adorable and wonderful to take care of your very own. Generating “look how great babies are” propaganda is trivial (just take a picture of one! that is it! you are done!). In certain corners of TikTok and Instagram free birthing, butter-churning, traditional wives present themselves as finding nothing but fulfilment from the bearing and rearing of children.
Framing motherhood as a tug of war between those for whom it is nothing but misery and others for whom it is Nirvana is obviously reductive—akin to trying to argue that life itself is either challenging or enjoyable. So far, for me, motherhood has almost always been both. The thrill of putting my son in the “coming home” outfit I lusted after for months and carefully washed, folded and packed into my hospital bag was shortly followed by the sheer, abject terror I experienced when confronted with trying to put this tiny, floppy shrimp of a human being into his car seat for the very first time. Still, the idea of a dichotomy made me keenly aware of times when pregnancy or motherhood subverted my expectations: when the potential drudgery was fun; a challenge unexpectedly rewarding.
An early revelation of this sort was that it was a joy to get dressed when I was pregnant. I had hoped this might be case—I have long been something of a clotheshorse. I religiously read (and once wrote a guest essay for!) fashion blogs like ManRepeller in my twenties. I now devour Substack content of a similar nature. Still, I feared pregnancy would be like an unfortunate second adolescence. I would grow out of everything, in new and weird ways, and be quickly confined to a small and dull selection of yoga pants and large t-shirts. Instead, pregnancy was something of an inspiration. The process encouraged me to just wear the fun things I have, look at my closet anew and demand more from items I bought. The experience has helped me get much closer to figuring out what it really is that I want from my wardrobe.
First, your window of opportunity to “dress the bump” is not actually that long. The period of pregnancy in which you actually look pregnant is surprisingly short for your first baby. For me (I am tall!) it was just the third trimester. There were pieces here and there I had picked up in recent years which I had mentally bookmarked as being ones that might work well during pregnancy. A crinkled Toteme dress I found through
’s newsletter (see above) was one such piece, as was a green knit dress from Aligne and a gold Rachel Comey dress (both below). If I wanted to try them out, like I imagined I might, there was no time like the present.
Second, it was particularly satisfying when this “just put it on” approach paid off with much older pieces. Years ago I bought an elasticated-waist seventies-style knit skirt at a Rixo sample sale. Ordinarily, the empire-line high waist felt a bit too dramatic and the hem a little long to be practical. As such the skirt had languished, mostly unworn, for years. But all skirts are empire-line come 30 weeks and the bump lifted the hem to a more manageable length. It became one of my absolute favourite things to wear. “Shop your own wardrobe” is a trite and overdone piece of advice, but as I grew out of things I became forced into the habit of digging deeper.
Third, when I did decide to buy new pieces, I was forced to be much pickier than usual. Like many women I tried to avoid buying too much proper maternity wear in favour of normal womenswear pieces that could have a longer shelf life. To work these needed to be loose and flowing, or stretchy. Shoes needed to be easy to put on—ideally slip-on. I was hot all the time, so my limited patience for synthetic fibres vanished altogether. My best additions were versatile, like this black Agnes B snap cardigan. It worked snapped in the middle earlier on, and at the neck once I got bigger (and is now a great piece for breastfeeding, too).
I got a lot of wear out of a stretchy tube skirt by Lauren Manoogian I was advised to buy by the uber-chic owner of a cute boutique in Portland, Maine (who is also a mother). I also loved wearing this 100% cotton bright orange sweater from babaa, a Spanish brand (which I found via “Gumshoe”, courtesy of
), because it was cosy but not too warm.
All the pieces that I liked wearing or buying had things in common. They were typically natural fibres. They had a kind of relaxed ease to them: flowing dresses, cardigans that could be shrugged on, skirts with elasticated waists and loafers or boots to just slide into. But because I was determined to wear my fancier things while I could the clothes I loved wearing also avoided being too schlubby. A cotton knitted sweater, rather than a sweatshirt; trousers with an elastic waist, not leggings; an extra-large button down instead of an oversized t-shirt.
Perhaps my opinion on this will shift in the coming months (I am still surrounded, every day, by the cuddly softness of post-partum: muslin cloths, nursing pillows, quilted playmats) but these are categorically the only clothes I am interested in acquiring now. The only pieces on my wish list are those that live at the intersection of “looks put together” and “you can sit cross-legged on the floor in this as you help teach your baby to roll over”. In the immortal words of Victoria Ratliff, of The White Lotus, “…I just don’t think, at this age, I am meant to live an uncomfortable life.”
Yet these constraints have proven anything but limiting. The lesson is one that many writers and artists already know to be true: restriction fosters creativity. A good essay requires a deadline, after all. (Up to a point, at least. As I blew past 40 weeks my sartorial efforts became entirely comprised of trying to style a pair of striped dungarees as many different ways as possible. My success there was… mixed).
Still, speaking of deadlines and constraints… I cannot express how happy I am that people have actually subscribed to this newsletter! There are a little more than 200 of you now which means it is not possible that you are all just members of my extended family. As such I am going to commit to doing this properly: I will plan to send a new letter out once a week. Right now the topics I have in mind are just “things that I found interesting” about pregnancy, birth, motherhood etc. but do feel free to tell me what you would like to see more of. More insane diagrams of life with a newborn? Let me know in the comments!
Love this!