At a certain point in my pregnancy, Instagram began to bombard me with pictures of a pregnant Margot Robbie. It felt like my feed was trolling me in a particularly mean way: hey, rapidly expanding lady, wanna see how the most beautiful woman in the world is handling all of this? And I did. After a while, I assume my feed became self-fulfilling: I kept looking at pictures of Robbie, my glowing pregnancy nemesis, so the algorithm offered me more and more. I wanted to see how she looked; I wanted to know what she was wearing. (Spoiler alert: she looked amazing, obvs.)
Margot has had her baby now, but still she pops up on the grid. She’s rocking a roomy pair of dungas and sunglasses, looking chic and slightly knackered, strolling alongside her husband who is pushing the pram. And I am still here, wondering what on earth to wear. Because although I have been given lots of hard-earned wisdom and advice during my pregnancy (some solicited, some not), no one warned me that putting together a decent outfit would become an undertaking more fraught than the politics around having an epidural.
Of course – duh – it shouldn’t have come as a surprise that growing a human would mean my body would change and my normal clothes would no longer fit me. Slightly unfair, maybe, given I’ve also been permanently pooped on account of experiencing the emotional fragility of a 13-year-old girl whose favourite boyband has just split up. But par for the course. It annoyed me from a financial point of view, this inconvenient tax on the female body, but maybe that’s because I’ve also been bombarded with the many other things I may or may not need to buy. Must I really spend more than £100 on a pelvic floor trainer that looks more like something you’d attach to a clipboard than your you-know-what, or otherwise face permanent incontinence forever? No wonder so many women have offered to send me their spreadsheets of the things that are actually worth paying for.
Anyway, I eventually accepted my fate, and in my second trimester I decided I would invest in a couple of items I could happily live in for the rest of the year, that would make me feel comfy as well as stylish, and, most importantly, enable me to wear clothes so I could leave the house. Except I had not foreseen the next instalment of this undignified saga: 99 per cent of maternity clothes are awful.
It is hard enough – literally – to get dressed when you are pregnant, since you no longer have a centre of gravity. But the fact that there are no nice clothes makes it absolutely impossible. Believe me, I tried to find them. I shopped the maternity brands; added to cart; awaited the parcels; and tried the clothes on with optimism that quickly faded to despair. I started seeing the man at the post office more than my actual midwife, as I underwent the faffy process of sending them all back. There were the dresses that looked sophisticated on the models but made me look like I’d fallen into a jumble sale at the local Women’s Institute. There were the spenny jumpsuits that were baggy in all the wrong places. And there were the bodycon numbers that turned me into a walking MailOnline headline: JESSIE FLAUNTS HER BUMP AS SHE GRABS GROCERIES AT SAINSBURY’S.
Baffled by the increasingly fruitless quest I found myself on, I posted an Instagram story asking for advice on where to find decent maternity clothes. I have never had so many replies to anything. The response was pretty unanimous, with battle-scarred women informing me not to bother with maternity brands, that they were all a waste of time. Searching elsewhere, I found Mumsnet threads titled “Maternity clothes hell”, “Maternity clothing argh!” and “Why are maternity clothes so ugly?”. I gave up.
I did receive some useful info, which I will duly pass on to those in a similar predicament. H&M is good for non-expensive basics. M&S do nice nursing bras (of course they do). Try sizing up in the clothes you normally wear and like (a great solution – my hero outfit has been a pair of Lucy & Yak dungarees in the size above). It also helps to have a lovely mother-in-law who buys you a coat that you’ll be able to keep wearing when you take your winter baby out for a walk.
Generally, though, the women who messaged me did so with a tone of stoical resignation. You will live in baggy jumpers and leggings, they said. Which I am perfectly content to do, except if I ever want to move beyond my sofa, attend a social occasion or, god forbid, participate in a professional engagement. I panicked about the day I had to do an on-stage event and couldn’t find an outfit that made me feel good or confident despite hours of searching. What will I wear to next week’s work Christmas party? Is it even worth contemplating? If I don the oversized Princess Diana-esque sheep jumper I bought in a summer sale, people may actually think I’ve come as Father Christmas.
Obviously, nature is nature: in pregnancy our bodies change quickly, and most of us don’t want to buy clothes that will only fit us for a few months. It’s a logistical conundrum, and one of the reasons why, over the past few years, maternity-wear rental companies have started to pop up. But these may not necessarily solve the fundamental issue: a complete dearth of maternity clothes that you might actually want to wear.
And it’s not just clothes that are the problem, it’s also what’s underneath. I found that Renue, a sustainable underwear brand, make a brilliant, comfy maternity set (including special bump shorts that are like a hug for your tum). The company was set up by women who wanted to fill a gap after they struggled to find comfortable underwear during their own pregnancies. And doesn’t the fact that it fell to busy new mums to solve this problem tell you everything you need to know?
Maybe it sounds a bit silly, a bit facetious, to be fretting about dresses when I am so fortunate to have my lovely bundle of joy on the way. (Who, by the way, will look way cooler than me – there seems to be no shortage of nice clothes for babies.) But women do not want to disappear off the face of the earth and fester in leggings just because they are pregnant; they still want to be part of the world. They still want to look nice!
And perhaps more at this time than ever. It’s a time when our bodies begin to feel like strangers to us in so many ways; when, whether we like it or not, they begin to make statements on our behalf, ones that are received by society in ways we cannot control. I’ve realised my loss of ownership around that is not down to Margot Robbie invading my Instagram feed. No: my true pregnancy nemesis is the dreaded maternity wardrobe.
