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Maternity attire getting a bit too tight for comfort

`They aren’t leaving a thing to the imagination.’ That’s one of my mother’s favorite expressions.

And she recently served it up during a conversation we were having about pregnant women and maternity clothes.

“When did it become chic for a pregnant woman to wear such skintight, form-fitting clothing?” she asks.

Face in full scrunch, she tells me that she’s been noticing this little fashion statement a lot lately on quite a few women of varying demographics. I’ve noticed it too. But it hasn’t moved me the way it has moved her.

“Their belly buttons are poking out,” she adds. “You’d be hard-pressed to find one that doesn’t poke out during pregnancy, but do we have to see this in such detail?”

My mother views pregnancy as a wonderful time when a woman’s figure, no matter how “WOW” it was prior to pregnancy, soon expands and contorts into one big “WHOA” that should be dutifully concealed.

For her, Spandex T-shirts and dresses are too tell-all and don’t help much. Neither does the warm weather, which reveals things and is the reason we’re having the conversation.

I toy with whether it’s worth reminding her that in agrarian societies a pregnant woman once was worshipped as a goddess–physique and all–and a sign that a good crop would yield a bountiful harvest.

I don’t speak these words, though. I know full well she’d only roll her eyes at me.

My mother’s two pregnancies occurred in the mid-to-late 1960s. Back when women wore muumuus, and other understated tentlike apparel, even before they started “to show.”

Her mother’s two pregnancies occurred in the mid-to-late 1930s, when, I suppose, women must have hidden themselves during gestation.

I was the subject of my mother’s fashion scrutiny in 1994, when my favorite outfit included a pair of Birkenstock sandals and a sky blue jumper that was so amenable to my expanding midsection I wore it every chance I could. By summer’s end, it was nearly threadbare.

A colleague and good friend advised me that I shouldn’t invest in too many maternity outfits. She said I should purchase a few outfits in larger sizes, which was how I’d arrived at my jumper. After the baby was born, she said, I could probably wear several of my overlarge sweaters again. Other wardrobe items I could donate or incinerate.

She also hipped me to the rubber band trick. It’s a way a pregnant woman can wear her more stylish pants beyond the time when they can no longer be zipped up all the way.

The rubber band trick works like this: You take three or four rubber bands, chain-link them until you have something that can work like a suspension bridge. You loop one end through the buttonhole of the pants and the other end around the button. And, viola! This allows you to wear normal pants a bit longer without the worry that they might slide down to your knees.

But here’s the rub: You have to wear a top that’s long and blousey enough to drape over the contraption.

Which circles me back around to my mother and her question about the tight-fitting clothes she has been seeing on pregnant women.

When did that look become fashionable?

No doubt we can attribute a large part of this to the recent flurry of Hollywood babes who are or have been with child. Over the last year or two we’ve seen in great detail the bulging profiles of Angelina, Britney, Katie and Gwyneth, just to name a few. We’ve even seen a very pregnant Denise Richards in several clingy mid-drifts.

I must admit that watching this may evoke comments like, `Now, that’s a look.’ But no more so than watching a man who has squeezed his girth into some form-fitting piece of attire.

On this, my mother and I agree. Neither leaves enough to the imagination.

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dtrice@tribune.com.