Rihanna and the politics of the exposed pregnancy bump

Telegraph

2 days ago

In the not-too-distant past, being pregnant on the red-carpet meant wearing Amish-style dresses that concealed not only your tummy, but every inch of flesh. Now, the celebrity bump is more than just present: it is the gleaming, oiled main event.
In this era of being Pregnant with a capital P, fabric is little more than a token gesture. Tops are cropped, skirts are low-slung and nobody is in any doubt that a baby is on the way. As evidenced by Rihanna, who was pictured at this year's Cannes Film Festival in an asymmetrical Brandon Maxwell dress with a thigh-high slit and most of the midriff missing. Yes, she seems to be saying, I am growing a person – but I still have better abs than you.
The Barbadian superstar, who is currently pregnant with her third child, has made a point throughout each of her pregnancies of encouraging her bump to do metaphorical jazz hands in skimpy lingerie, barely-there dresses and glitter bralettes. Proving how a well-timed pregnancy reveal can boost your career, the superstar had one of the biggest moments of her professional life when she showed off the imminent arrival of her first child at the Super Bowl by performing in a red Loewe jumpsuit unbuttoned to the navel.
At the time, she said to the now-head of British Vogue, Chioma Nnadi. 'I'm hoping that we were able to redefine what's considered 'decent' for pregnant women. My body is doing incredible things right now and I'm not going to be ashamed of that. This time should feel celebratory. Because why should you be hiding your pregnancy?'
In celebrity-land, at least, it seems nobody is. In the last year, Hailey Bieber has bared her bump in an underwear shoot for W Magazine, Adwoa Aboah has worn a two-piece H&M number with eight inches of bare flesh for a premiere and Margot Robbie has been photographed on Lake Como accessorising her bump with a crop top.
This is very much a millennial trend – a natural next step to the confident, body-conscious, overtly sexy dressing the generation has pioneered. But they can't lay claim to inventing the bared baby bump – that accolade belongs to Vanity Fair, which put a naked seven-month-pregnant Demi Moore on the cover in 1991, photographed by Annie Leibovitz. And while it doesn't seem particularly outrageous now, the image would shock and fascinate the world when it was released – which delighted then-editor Tina Brown, who later explained she was tired of any woman past the first trimester only getting head shots. 'Women need this, dammit,' she said.
But whereas in the early 1990s this daring new way of celebrating pregnancy lived and died with the famous, in the 2020s, the trend has jumped to the real world. Grace Kapin, who co-founded the maternity brand Storq and lives in Brooklyn, has seen a stark change in the way women dress since she was last pregnant five years ago. (And yes, New York's ultra body-conscious, fashion-forward aesthetic is hardly representative of us all – but where they lead, global trends tend to follow.)
'There has been a transformation on the streets of New York and I honestly think it is down to the celebrities,' she says. 'Suddenly, there are bare bellies everywhere: women are rolling down the waistbands of their jeans and wearing short tank tops and barely buttoned shirts. This would have been considered sloppy or desperate before, but now it is peak style.'
For Eliza, 31, who works in PR in London, feeling like she was able to bare a little skin made pregnancy dressing significantly easier. 'I remember my mum being quite shocked when I met her last summer at eight months pregnant wearing a low-slung wrap skirt with a chunk of my belly exposed,' says Eliza. 'She thought it was too much, but it made me feel good and it meant I could keep wearing my own clothes for much longer.'
Eliza was mostly relieved not to be confined to the tent-like pieces her mother had worn in the late 1980s. 'At first, I tried the roomy dresses and tops that looked cool and oversized before I got pregnant but I quickly realised I looked huge,' she says. 'I think it is because there is something so wholesome about being pregnant that you look pretty boring fast unless you do something a bit unexpected, like show some skin.'
Gracie Egan, a creative consultant in London who is currently six-months pregnant agrees. 'It is so empowering to see beautiful strong working mothers like Rihanna and Sienna Miller embracing and showcasing their pregnancies. They push boundaries by wearing bold, daring outfits which contradict traditional ideas of how a pregnant woman should 'dress'.'
And yet for many women, pregnancy is less a time of glorious fecundity and more one difficult slog to the finish line – and being expected to look sexy and glamorous while growing a person can feel like yet another pressure.
'Honestly, I have never felt less attractive than I did when I was pregnant,' says Jemima, 36, who had her first baby in 2023. 'Throughout the first trimester I felt sick any time I wasn't eating, but all I wanted was bland food like plain cheese on toast. I put on so much weight that I moved up two dress sizes before I even started to show. And as the pregnancy went on, it felt like my body was just holding onto every calorie it could. And don't even get me started on the bloating.'
Jemima was eight months pregnant when Miller attended the September 2023 launch of Vogue World with her second trimester baby bump protruding out of a puffball skirt and crop top by Schiaparelli. The one-time boho queen immediately went viral on social media and appeared on the front page of multiple national newspapers. Soon after that, Miller was featured on the cover of Vogue in a very small pair of pants and a jumper.
'It sounds ridiculous but I burst into tears when endless pictures of her appeared on my Instagram feed,' says Jemima. 'She looked so slender and sexy and I felt like an absolute house and only wanted to wear my husband's shirts and tracksuits to cover up as much as I could. I felt like there was something wrong with me.'
Pip Durell, the founder of cult shirting company With Nothing Underneath, was pregnant at the same time as Miller and also remembers it well. 'I definitely thought Sienna looked so cool, but I also thought, 'I could never'. I very much believe that you should let your bump out if you want to, but for me it is about choice and I knew I wanted to try and stay true to my own personal style of oversized shirts and jeans. Pregnancy is a time when everything is changing; it was important to me to recognise my own wardrobe.'
I too was pregnant in 2023, and I reasoned that if I didn't wear crop tops in normal life, why would I start now? As for Miller, I understand how difficult these comparisons can be as I vividly remember her appearing on a red carpet when both our babies were a few months old: she was slim, vivacious and glowing, while I was a husk of a human, barely surviving on a few hours sleep a night.
It's no wonder then, that all this can feel more fraught than it should. Millennials are probably lucky not to be confined to the same Princess Diana floral smocks our mothers were, and to have far more freedom to dress the way we want or to even bare some skin if we feel like it. But I wonder if we have also lost something. Pregnancy used to offer a bit of a break from the usual fashion rules – and from the need to look cool, or stylish, or sexy. Now, the bump is fast becoming so fashionable that the pressure is on to make the most of it.