Pregnancy and maternity clothes needed Rihanna to revolutionize them
Rihanna maternity dress style means pregnancy and maternity clothes will never be the same.
I’m currently 30 weeks pregnant with twins. Trying to navigate this strange new identity as a pregnant person (and, gulp, soon to be mother) has been mildly terrifying and generally pretty confusing. While so much is changing in my life so quickly, I find myself grasping on to the few things I can control. One of those is what I wear and how I present this new body I’m in to the world.
When I got pregnant, targeted ads for clothing immediately began filling my inbox and feeds: tent dresses, maternity leggings, oversized everything — all very obvious ways to hide my delicate condition. Maybe this is the hormones talking, but I remember registering the suggestions as erasure: some clever and comfy ways to hide my body while it created new life. And then the singer Rihanna announced her pregnancy, and it felt like everything changed.
Before giving birth in early May, Rihanna bared her bump in sometimes sexy, sometimes sporty, always fashion-forward ways. As she told Vogue in a recent cover story that focused on her rule-breaking pregnancy fashion: “There’s no way I’m going to go shopping in no maternity aisle. I’m sorry — it’s too much fun to get dressed up. I’m not going to let that part disappear because my body is changing.”
Rihanna drove her point home by gracing the cover in a sheer, red Alaïa bodysuit, and in body-baring looks all across this season’s fashion weeks, not to mention her Instagram feed. Instead of the usual maternity jeans and demure empire waist dresses, pregnant Rihanna opted for low-slung pants that showed off her bump, sheer mini dresses that did the same and lots of provocative silhouettes and cutouts that kept her linea nigra on full display. Rather than conceal herself, Rihanna demanded that people look.
“When women get pregnant, society tends to make it feel like you hide, hide your sexy, and that you’re not sexy right now [but] you’ll get back there, and I don’t believe in that s---,” she told Refinery29 back in February. “So I’m trying stuff that I might not have even had the confidence to try before I was pregnant. The strappiest, the thinnest and the more cutouts the better for me.” Preach Rihanna, preach.
Rating: 5