From Chanel to Victoria’s Secret, visible bumps and breastfeeding are increasingly being used to sell clothes. It says a lot about fashion’s changing relationship with women.
Fashion loves to break its own rules, then unbreak them, then pretend the rules didn’t exist, then act as though everyone knew the rules all along, and since from the outside there is only one rule – be thin – this leads to some quite complex conversations. One year, you will find a plus-size model on every catwalk, and the next year they will have vanished.
But the final frontier is the pregnant woman, or – pretty much interchangeably, because you always look pregnant for ages after you are, unless you’re Madonna – the breastfeeding woman. There was that brief moment in 1991, when Annie Leibovitz put a gravid Demi Moore on the cover of Vanity Fair wearing nothing at all (commentators describe her pose as the “hand-bra”). Nothing came after. The pregnant woman remained culturally invisible, which really is a curious sensation when you’re in it, given how ginormous you are.
New York fashion week broke that article of faith last year, when the Eckhaus Latta show featured Maia Ruth Lee, who was eight months pregnant at the time, wearing a cardigan dress with a perfectly domed opening for her mighty tum, like something a midwife might design if he or she were in such a rush they wanted to measure everyone’s fundus by eye. But that reminded everyone: there actually had been some pregnant catwalk models, this decade. You could fit them all into two taxis, like the Lib Dems, but nine is more than none.
There was Jourdan Dunn for Jean Paul Gaultier’s spring/summer 2010 show and Italian model Bianca Balti for Dolce & Gabbana’s autumn/winter 2015 collection.
For more read the full of article at The Guardian
