Motherhood, whether achieved through biological or other means, is not a rare experience; dressing oneself, even less so. The two phenomena are intimately linked, as both occur on and to the private body, and are also fully subject to social pressures and the changing tides of public opinion. They also, for anyone who experiences motherhood, define one another and work together to shape an individual’s identity and place in their culture.
This rich collection explores the essential question of how motherhood and fashion interact, interrogating their relationships to power, misogyny, temporality, longing and embodiment, among other themes. The 13 essays examine representations on film, in popular print and literature; they use images, narrative and material evidence from the past to excavate the historical cleavages in how mothers have been expected to hide, display, share and sacrifice their bodies. An international range of scholars explores the 19th to the 21st centuries, tracing how fashion and motherhood have operated as powerfully interdependent experiences and continue to determine how women are judged and corralled, yet also find meaning, connection and strength.
List of Illustrations
Preface
Foreword
Acknowledgments
Fashion and Motherhood: Introduction
Part I: Image
Introduction
Mediated Role Models
Introduction
1. Dress to Repress: Fashioning Motherhood in Semi-Authoritarian Hong Kong
Pui-sze Leung and Kin-long Tong
2. Beyoncé: Mistress of Slaying Oshun
Darnell-Jamal Lisby
3. The Hidden Life of Kylie: Fashioning a Private (and Privatized) Celebrity Pregnancy
Maureen Lehto Brewster
Fictional Mothers Onscreen
Introduction
4. The Fashionable Mother as Dangerous Contradiction in Telugu Film
Indira Jalli
5. Fashion and Motherhood at War: A Costume Analysis of The Zookeeper’s Wife
Morolake Dairo
6. The Fascinance of the Maternal Gaze: Kate and Laura Mulleavy’s Woodshock
Kimberly Lamm
Part II: Material
Introduction
7. “The Corset Crusade”: Dress Reformers and the Maternity Corset
Karen Case
8. Design for Borderline Bodies
Lauren Downing Peters
9. Mother’s Milk Is Best of All: Breastfeeding Garments from 1880 to 1930
Claire Salmon
10. Rei Kawakubo and the Bound Pregnant Body
Katrina Orsini
Part III: Identity
Introduction
11. “Mommy Fashion is Still Fashion”: U.S. Style Guides for Pregnant Women and Mothers in the Twenty-First Century
Holly Kent
12. Out of Time: Constant Change, Maternity Dressing, and Pregnancy in Lockdown
Sarah Garland
13. “Ole Rag ‘n’ Lumber”: Intergenerational, Gendered, and Classed Relationships with Clothing, from Rag ‘n’ Bone to Depop
Liza Betts
Appendix: Sexy Mamas: Liz Lange and the Golden Age of Designing for Pregnancy
Pamela Roskin
List of Contributors
Index
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