Maternal (Fashion) Instincts : The traditional mom-to-be clothing for these women? No way. They’re pulling together their own style: oversize and men’s duds, baby-doll dresses, even hubby’s PJs. You get the picture. And designers like Joan Vass are also trying their hand.
Excited over her first pregnancy, Los Angeles artist Katie Freedman Davis dashed into a maternity store, spent $75 for a bra and a cotton jumpsuit-- and learned a valuable lesson.
“It taught me I didn’t want to spend all my money for clothes that I was only going to wear six months,” says Davis, who created a maternity wardrobe from regular retail and loaners and is proud of it.
A former Size 8, she bought larger sizes, including a Size 12-14 bikini; fished in her closet for garments she once considered too big; discovered the magic of vintage vests, and borrowed as much clothing as she could, including maternity jeans, from friends.
The results? “It was so much fun to get dressed and look in the mirror and see how my body was changing and how I could show it off,” Davis says.
Going the whole nine months without a maternity wardrobe isn’t for every woman. Figure problems and corporate dress codes are just some of the obstacles. But women with the knack and the freedom to follow their fashion instincts say it is the only way to go, especially when oversize clothing is everywhere.
They would do almost anything--change shoulder pads, rely on safety pins, snip elastic, add elastic, borrow their husband’s clothing, shop large-size stores and hike garments above or below their stomachs--to avoid the maternity clothing they say is overpriced or dowdy, or both.
Maternity insiders see it differently. The national retail chain A Pea in the Pod, for example, says it offers women “uninterrupted style.” Louella Hundt, vice president of merchandising and marketing, says designers such as David Dart, Carole Little, Joan Vass, Adrienne Vittadini and Leon Max “are taking clothing from their regular lines and cutting it to the maternity specs we give them.”
And Rebecca Matthias, president of Mothers Work and Mimi Maternity, also with stores nationwide, believes women who complain about maternity clothes are forgetting something: “When you’re not pregnant, you probably have 59 stores to choose from in a mall. Then you go into one maternity store. We try to fill a woman’s needs in typically 1,000 square feet. It’s very difficult to offer the same variety.”
But pregnant women who want to dress and shop as they always have say they are unimpressed--even depressed--by much of what they find. Davis, for example, couldn’t find a maternity swimsuit for less than $75. With her husband’s encouragement, she bought a $20 fuchsia bikini at Nordstrom. “I loved wearing it,” she says. “I got a lot of smiles at the beach.”
To preserve her individual style, she decorated the bodices of baby-doll dresses from Contempo Casuals with flea-market buttons. She added more buttons to men’s vintage vests from Jet Rag, a secondhand store on Melrose Avenue, and wore them with the dresses, jeans and skirts. “A vest makes an outfit and pulls your look together,” Davis says. “And it has the added advantage of covering you up a little bit.”
Rejecting maternity dresses and baby-doll dresses, actress Danielle Von Zerneck of Los Angeles bought three vintage pregnancy smocks “with big, bright buttons and nice collars” for $80 each at Golyester on Melrose. She paired them with a unitard from A Pea in the Pod or Hue maternity leggings and says: “They made me feel trendy again.” She also shopped Big & Tall men’s stores for extra-large Hanes T-shirts and Jockey turtlenecks to wear over the leggings or under a big, baggy pair of men’s Levi’s--made trendy with suspenders--from Millers Outpost.
Van Nuys actress Barbara Campbell, 5 feet, 8 inches tall and a pre-pregnancy Size 10-12, had her “best luck” at Lane Bryant, buying leggings for less than $15 and a bright red blouse with huge black buttons (“a cross between an ‘I Love Lucy’ shirt and a bowling shirt”) for $20. Instead of paying $150 for maternity dresses and $68 for sweaters, she bought a $70 A-line dress and $9.99 knit tunics in the large-size department of Robinsons-May. “The sweaters were pretty much the same,” she says. “Except the ones in the maternity shop came just to the upper thigh, so they jutted out and made you look much bigger.”
Janet Tamaro, an L.A.-based correspondent for “Inside Edition” who appeared on camera until her delivery day, passed up nearly all maternity merchandise--except leggings and a free-flowing jumpsuit. Her working wardrobe included bargains from the Cooper Building in downtown Los Angeles where Tamaro, a pre-pregnancy Size 4-6, bought Size 12-14 wool jackets (she still wears one with a jacket clip) for $90 to $100 each and replaced her silk blouses with $25 polyester imitations that were as long as the jackets.
“You want to carry through your normal style,” she says. “That gets harder and harder to do. I know I dressed more casually, but comfort was more of an issue than ever.”
To create her own comfort zone, fashion stylist Daryl Offer of Los Angeles wore $20 maternity leggings from Kmart, borrowed her husband’s business shirts and made some garments, including circle skirts, a slip dress and an empire-waisted “ ‘40s knockoff” dress.
She also wore men’s polka-dotted pajamas, from American Rag on La Brea, out to dinner, adding a T-shirt, mules and jewelry. And the oversize linen overalls and jacket she bought at David Dart in Santa Monica “were great,” she says. “People all over town asked me where I got them.”
Stephanie Faulkner-Peschke, a Los Angeles actress and writer, and Nancy Ullman, public-relations coordinator for the California Mart, have found success with high-waisted non-maternity dresses. Faulkner-Peschke has several favorites, including a ‘70s-inspired tie-dyed dress that cost about $80 at Eugenia in the Westside Pavilion. One of Ullman’s favorites is a $19.99 denim baby-doll dress from Forever 21, another mall store.
But she also splurged on a $200 Max Studio maternity dress at A Pea in the Pod even though, says the Valencia resident, “I don’t have that kind of a salary. I don’t mind because I can wear it after.” Not to mention the sex appeal. “It shows a little cleavage. A pregnant woman still wants to feel a little sexy.”
Hope Brown, a Santa Monica teacher’s aide, attended a black-tie wedding in a sexy black dress during her pregnancy. But it took some doing. She scoured the maternity stores and found a $500 Victor Costa she liked. But Brown, 5 feet, 10 inches tall and a pre-pregnancy Size 10, says: “I wouldn’t spend that money normally, let alone on a maternity dress.”
The solution was a short rayon-crepe slip dress with spaghetti straps and a China silk lining that can be worn after pregnancy. It cost $175 and was made by Malibu dressmaker Kirsten Marie Holt, who will take measurements by phone or mail.
Holt is now making a trendy, seven-piece maternity wardrobe--including velvet stretch leggings, palazzo pants and hip-length vests--for a San Francisco woman, and she isn’t surprised by the long-distance order:
“I’ve been into maternity stores and they have some nice stuff, but everything looks so matronly. The women I know go through this emotional thing where they don’t think they look good, they feel too fat, and the last thing they want is to put on some droopy thing with drab colors.”
