Rihanna's new advertising campaign for her lingerie brand, Savage x Fenty.
Rihanna's new advertising campaign for her lingerie brand, Savage x Fenty.
Like da Vinci’s Madonna Litta, Rihanna has been photographed breastfeeding her 15-month-old son. Except that naturally, in this pop icon reimagining, the mother wears a handful of vintage rings and mandala tattoos with her designer nursing bra, while the baby matches in a logoed nappy cover.
To see one of the world’s most confident and experimental dressers taking on arguably the most unglamorous of clothing items – the nursing bra – we can celebrate some progress in the slow world of maternity fashion.
Rihanna’s style in motherhood is unapologetically her own; from her bump-baring Chanel maternity outfits, to her family Vogue magazine shoots with matching leathers for all. Her life may have changed forever when she had a child, but her identity and her image did not – and she has spoken of her mission to reframe what it means to dress “like a mum”.
“The new maternity capsule is about bringing that confidence and comfort to moms at every stage of their journeys,” she said of the collection, which sacrifices no functionality as a result of adding lace, apex lines and nice colours beyond “milk”.
“I want to remind people that you can still channel sexiness and feel good while being a parent.”
The phrase “dressing like a mum” is a loaded one. Call a woman’s style “mumsy” (especially when accompanied by a judgy tilt of the head in a changing room) and it can be deemed an insult – regardless of age and whether the recipient actually has children.
Rihanna's new advertising campaign for her lingerie brand, Savage x Fenty
“I believe that the dated stigma and negative connotations of ‘dressing like a mum’ or ‘mum style’ came originally from the idea that women ‘give up on themselves’ and become invisible once they became a parent,” considers Zoë de Pass, the Brighton-based mother of three who founded Dress Like A Mum, a campaign “designed to dispel the myth that mums can’t dress”.
“This simply isn’t true,” says de Pass. “Most mothers I know are more confident now in how we dress than we have ever been – we have less to prove and care less what people think of us – which makes fashion even more fun.”
The high-street brand Boden surveyed 1000 British mothers, and found that 49 per cent of the participants, who were all aged between 18 and 34 years old, said that they felt less attractive after having children. While 66 per cent admitted that they changed how they dress.
The insult of “dressing like a mum” becomes yet more redundant when you try to define what that outfit actually looks like. Is it a woman in a floral dress and trainers? Is she wearing high-waisted loose-leg jeans?
The fickle fashion industry cycles its ideas as to what’s “frumpy” so regularly that there’s no point looking there for clarity. Some of the world’s leading fashion brands are indeed run by mothers – Stella McCartney and Victoria Beckham each have four children. Topshop first launched its “mom” jeans in 2014 – now the style is a mainstay at most major denim labels, sold to women of all ages.
Mumsnet founder Justine Roberts, CBE, says that she hears “repeatedly” on the brand’s chat forums from women who are “wrestling with their self-image after having children.
“Tired tropes about dressing ‘like a mum’ only add to the huge pressures experienced by mothers of young children, and are grounded in the sort of sexist stereotyping that writes women off and expects them to behave in a certain way when they become mothers,” she says.
“Motherhood is fundamental, but it’s not defining, and mums are as entitled as everyone else to wear whatever they like without judgment. If Rihanna’s new maternity wear range helps to remind the world of that, then that’s a good thing.”
Any celebrity, or facet of the fashion industry, which is out to promote good feeling and style confidence for mothers should be celebrated. De Pass says that when she first began campaigning for more stylish and considered maternity clothing on the high street in 2015, she was astonished to see how little effort some key British retailers were putting into designing their ranges.
“Maternity fashion was slow to catch up,” she says. “In 2015 I talked directly to Asos about their maternity collection strategy – and they didn’t have one. They told me that the (male) buyer would simply choose a few tops to do long versions of, without any regard for who was wearing them or what their lives entailed. At the time they had no breastfeeding-friendly tops or bras – it was a whole demographic they used to ignore.”
Now, Asos’s maternity range is generally celebrated. In the lingerie industry, Savage x Fenty isn’t the first to do pretty nursing bras – Glasgow-based Six Studio, New Zealand’s Hotmilk, and Sheffield’s Panache Lingerie are just some of the many smaller labels offering style as well as practicality.
But Rihanna, freshly minted by Vogue as the “world’s most stylish mum”, is undoubtedly the face of the generation out to reclaim the mum style narrative.
“It is great to see Rihanna’s collection,” says de Pass. “She is the ultimate cool, stylish, successful, beautiful mum – with people like her flying the flag, we can turn ‘dressing like a mum’ into the compliment us mums already know it is.”
