Tuesday 9 October 2012

Pregnancy Style Diary, week 11 | Breaking the jeans barrier




Hello everyone! What did you wear through your pregnancy?

I meant to write a series on this topic for while, and it seems fitting to do it now that I am pregnant again. I hope you enjoy it and share your experience with me!


To catch you up on my style journey so far, today's first couple of posts in the series look back at the end of my first trimester and the beginning of the second one.



In her editorial to the October issue of Flare, newly-appointed editor Miranda Purves thinks back to the year she left her job at Elle in New York in order to be a Stay at Home Mom or, as she shortens it, SAHM, "the pronunciation of which sounds like a sexless childcare robot".  Miranda indicates that the hardest part of having left her job was "missing her clothes" or "more accurately, the daily creative act of dressing."

I understood so well what she meant. Even though I have not left my job, this summer I had decided to be a SAHM too, and to let go of the pressure of squeezing a few hours of research in between playdates and outings at the parks in order to concentrate on what was important (yes, Hands Free Mama, you are a great inspiration to me): my son, and getting our family settled back into our house in Canada.

Two days after we landed, I found out I was pregnant, and my plans changed. As I written earlier in this post, I have been functional for two-to-three hours a day for most of the summer. My biggest activity consisted of driving my son to summer camp and picking him up. Sometimes make an occasional outing to the grocery store. Needless to say I had zero incentives to get dressed in the morning. In addition, during my first pregnancy, I had not gained any weight until well past 25 weeks. This time around, likely because I was at one of my all-times-low-weight points (thank you, move-related stress!), I was not able to button those bright colored pants I had stocked up in Italy almost right after the pregnancy test turned positive.

Last time I had also been pregnant during the summer, and I had given birth earlier than expected in early Fall. When I opened the box of maternity clothing I have been carrying around through 2 moves and one year of storage, it was obvious that almost nothing was weather-suitable for this pregnancy. I also have to confess that during my first pregnancy I felt badly dressed and uncomfortable, and I definitely do not want to repeat the experience this time. I realize now how important it is, through the many changes your body undergoes, to feel fabulous in what you wear! The little stuff I had in my "maternity wear" box went straight to the Salvation Army and I savaged only a pair of dressy grey pants and two sweaters.


Luckily for me, when out went the pants-wearing options, a quite large number of possibilities opened in terms of my breezy summer dresses, accumulated over time to face the summer heat in Italy and recently updated with the two Marni for H&M ones I scored back in February. I kept this array of dresses on heavy rotation during the summer months, and I felt surprisingly stylish in spite of the nausea and constant fatigue.


The temperature will start dropping soon, however, so I decided to tackle the "bottom" problem. I set off for Bloom Maternity, an up-scale maternity store in the neighbourhood, where I had gotten my designer maternity jeans last time. I am sure you know this stuff does not come cheap, unless there is a GAP maternity store in your neighbourhood (which is definitely not the case in Québec). I was thus thrilled to find out that Bloom Maternity now offers customers the option of converting into maternity styles their own jeans. For 40 bucks a pop, the jeans' waist gets removed and replaced with a maternity stretchy band. For another 40 bucks, you can then bring back the jeans to their pre-pregnancy silhouette. If you do the math, what you end up spending is way less than the cost of designer maternity jeans, but could still be a bit pricey. What I did is thus the following: converted two pairs of designer jeans and two pairs of cheaper jeans styles, the latter two with the idea of getting rid of them at the end of the pregnancy. One of the styles I had tailored is a simple pair of GAP 1969 black cropped jeans, which I can easily use as workwear in the Fall thus eliminating the need for dressy black pants. Voilà. I reconquered my jeans closet.


P.S. Click here for more posts in the "What I wrote through my pregnancy" series.



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