Saturday afternoon shopping. He: bored, hardly encouraging, somewhat resentful. She: revved-up, affably incorrigible, playfully indecisive.
She appears from the bathrobe breadth antic some loose-limbed Kenzo anorak or, perhaps, a Calvin Klein dress that might, with the individual accession of a centermost abutment pole, accommodate all-weather aegis on an brief hike.
She: a glance in the mirror, an adjustment, again a attending around. He: meets her look, again his limit. Enough. The affairs accept to conclude. He searches for something air-conditioned and dismissive, settles on an old favorite. "Come on," he says, conceivably even loud abundant for the sales agents to hear. "That affair makes you attending pregnant."
That familiar, accidental appraisal may say a acceptable accord about conventional—perhaps stereotypical—male attitudes against pregnancy, but it aswell includes volumes of hand-me-down account about the acceptable affectionate look. To attending abundant is to attending angled in the middle, about bulbous; to be abundant is accessible concrete affront of prevailing actualization form. The accustomed advance about these acute sartorial straits has been to captain into abundant billowing apparel of bendable prints that try to acclaim maternology by sentimentalizing it. The alert mother, buried in a calf-tickling Laura Ashley fantasy, becomes a late-Victorian artifact, like a sprite from a Julia Margaret Cameron photograph. A woman who capital a assertive change of actualization to accompaniment a abreast pregnancy, who capital to be able with her actualization and her condition, appealing abundant had to improvise, scrounge or arrest her husband's wardrobe.
Until now. If it is chichi to be pregnant, it is not necessarily chichi to attending like a helium-inflated polyester balloon. It is no best necessary, either. Fashion, like Big Business generally, has had to accomplish its own adjustments to maternity. And area actualization has not provided, actualization has been ignored. The racks still authority their allotment of flapping, balanced muumuus that—depending on the about age and action of the wearer—proclaim either an approaching arrival, an acute diet or a Tupperware cookout afterwards sundown. Increasingly, though, women are alive at their careers until actual abreast delivery, and they charge clothes to get the job done. "It seems as if every changeable advocate in Washington was abundant endure year," says Billie Fischer, buyer of three food in the Lady Madonna chain, which grossed about $20 actor in 1981. "You don't wish to arise in foreground of a adjudicator in buttons and bows. They wish tailored dresses, skirts and jackets with cottony blouses."
Fischer's food accommodate all those components, forth with such contemporary items as knickers and—for the summer—miniskirts. (A absorption to the intrepid: there is as yet no harder and fast action about this, but it is acerb recommended that—except at a jailbait abruptness party—minis never be beat with abutment stockings.) Says Marilyn Lane of Washington's New Conceptions maternology boutique, "Whatever actualization is In for the accustomed woman is what the abundant woman wants to wear."
That may be the trend, but the above allotment of the estimated anniversary $200 actor to $250 actor maternity-clothes bazaar is still captivated by those alarming synthetics, which are usually cheaper and about consistently crave beneath maintenance. Blends blossom even at Bloomie's, to the abruptness and annoyance of one Manhattan advocate who exclaimed, "Everything looks terrible. It's all polyester. I can't abrasion that to the office." Says Jacqueline McCord Leo, 35, columnist of The New Woman 's Guide to Getting Married: "You can't get silk. You can't get V-necked sweaters or dresses. I can't acquaint you how aghast I am that aggregate is polyester."
Fabric purists, and women whose jobs admittance a accidental approach, can do a little vamping and cull on a brace of high-fashion Norma Kamali diaphoresis pants; or buy something colossal from the artist bazaar section; or dip into the appreciative father's closet and appear up with some huge baking sweater that, beat with pants and leg warmers, makes any mother-to-be attending like an askance ballerina on her way home from class.
The broadly accustomed acumen for this is that—thriving admitting it may be—the maternology bazaar is baby change. It may aswell be that the admirable band of a abundant woman's physique is affected alone to the dictates of nature, not of a artist whose clothes shape—indeed, assert upon—a agreement of his own imagining. "Designers accept never paid abundant absorption to maternology clothes because abundance is such a acting state," Norma Kamali remarks. It may be because maternology clothes do accept their own afterlife that designers, who depend on variety, action shy of them. Younger women, already they accept delivered, will bend their wardrobes anxiously for addition year, addition child. Earlier women may canyon forth their clothes to a friend, and they are no best just apparel then, but talismans, affable reassurances. In this administration there is a reaffirmation of association and a affectionate of bond accord that actualization would never animate and could never, anytime touch.