When Motherhood Meets Fashion School
- Anabella Bergero
- May 11
- 9 min read
A Reflection on the Stories Left Out of the Syllabus
It began with a class exercise. I asked my students to introduce themselves and share what brought them into fashion. I didn’t expect so many to mention their mothers. “My mom taught me how to sew,” one said. “I used to play with my mom’s clothes,” said another. The pattern was clear: it wasn’t Vogue or Fashion Week, but their mothers who inspired them.
Barbara Maza, one of my students, was quiet that day. But later she told me, “I realized everyone talked about their moms, and I got curious. Why are our mothers such a deep reference point?” That question sparked a year-long research journey into motherhood, media, and fashion.
While I encouraged her to pursue the topic, I felt I was stepping into forbidden territory. In over a decade in the fashion world, I had never seen motherhood seriously discussed. Soon after, I was called into the program director’s office. “Why are you here?” she asked. “Why aren’t you somewhere being a mother?” I sat there, stunned, as if I had broken a silent rule. Her words revealed more than personal judgment. They echoed a belief that motherhood doesn’t belong in the classroom, the studio, or the syllabus. Even in a space devoted to dressing women’s bodies, there was no room to talk about the ones that birth and nourish life.
At the same time, motherhood arrived in my own life. My youngest sister gave birth. I became an aunt. Barbara’s research met me at a threshold. What had once felt distant was now around the corner.
The Origins of It All
Barbara’s origin story is not just academic. She was born against all odds. Her mother, after losing a child, multiple miscarriages, and surgeries, was told she’d never have another child. Then she had a dream of La Virgen de Coromoto, Venezuela’s patron saint, who appeared to her in a garden, surrounded by a rainbow, whispering: "You will be a mother." Days later, she discovered she was pregnant with Barbara. It is this story, part myth and part miracle, that marked the beginning of Barbara’s exploration. And it’s this intimacy, between personal, spiritual and scientific, that the topic of motherhood demands.
“There’s almost no information about motherhood in fashion,” Barbara told me early in our conversations. And she’s right. Aside from a few notable works such as Fashion and Motherhood: Image, Material, Identity by Laura Snelgrove and M&others: Fashion and Motherhood by Karolien De Clippel and Karen Geysels, the bibliography remains remarkably thin.
For an industry largely dominated by women, fashion has been strikingly silent about the realities of maternity. We make space for sex, glamour, death, even decay. But not for pregnancy. Not for the stretched body, the stitched body, the breastfeeding body, the body that creates.
Where is she?
From Antiquity to the Victorian Era
“Our journey into this inquiry begins far before the catwalk,” Barbara explains. The Venus of Willendorf, a 30,000-year-old limestone figure with exaggerated breasts and belly, is one of the first known representations of the pregnant female form. No name, no face. Just body, round, fertile, origin.
Across ancient civilizations, the female body was revered as sacred. Goddesses like Isis, Inanna, Demeter, and Pachamama embodied nature’s power to create and sustain. Woman was not only mother, but cosmos.
With Christianity, this reverence shifted but remained. The Virgin Mary became Western theology’s central maternal figure, pure, nurturing, chosen. Her sexuality was erased, but her motherhood exalted. Cathedrals were built in her name. Her image adorned altars and homes. In Mary, motherhood carried divine weight.
That prominence faded. The Protestant Reformation rejected Marian devotion, removing her from churches and severing the link between holiness and motherhood. The maternal figure, once sacred, was relegated to the private realm.
The Enlightenment and French Revolution accelerated this erasure. Mystery gave way to reason. Woman, once symbol of the earth’s cycles, was redefined by civic expectations. Reproduction became duty. The body, a site of control.
By the Victorian era, pregnancy disappeared from view. Maternity corsets flattened bellies. Modesty became law. “Pregnancy was proof of sex,” Barbara explains, “and sex was not to be seen or spoken about.” The maternal body, once sculpted in stone and painted in gold, was now draped in shame.
Religious doctrine reinforced the silence. Protestantism had erased the Virgin from the altar. Victorian morality completed the task with rigid norms of femininity. The image of the mother was not just hidden. It was erased.
The Modern Dilemma
In 1952, American audiences saw something revolutionary: Lucille Ball’s pregnancy written into her character on I Love Lucy. Yet even as her belly grew, she and her on-screen husband still slept in separate beds. The word "pregnant" wasn’t even allowed on air. Motherhood was visible, but only barely.
Fast forward eight years. The birth control pill is introduced. Suddenly, sex is uncoupled from reproduction. A wave of sexual freedom rolls in, yet the maternal body is still nowhere to be seen. If anything, it becomes a source of anxiety, something to delay, suppress, freeze.
This contrast, between the hesitant visibility of pregnancy in mid-century television and the fervent emancipation promised by the pill, speaks volumes. First, pregnancy was hidden under propriety. Then, it was hidden under progress.
With the rise of second-wave feminism in the 1960s and 70s, many women rejected traditional gender roles, and with them, the cultural expectation of motherhood. Influential texts like Shulamith Firestone’s The Dialectic of Sex argued that childbearing was a form of oppression, a biological destiny that tethered women to domestic life. Motherhood, in this framework, became a symbol of patriarchy’s grip, a reality to be escaped rather than embraced.
“In both cases,” I asked Barbara, “wasn’t pregnancy still being erased? First as shame, then as inconvenience?”
And yet, not all cultural forces moved in the same direction. In parallel with feminist critique, the countercultural movements of the late 60s and 70s, especially the hippie movement, began to reclaim pregnancy through a different lens. The back-to-nature ethos emphasized the body, earth, and cyclical rhythms. Home births, midwifery, and natural mothering gained traction, offering an alternative to the sanitized, institutionalized approach to childbirth.
Pregnancy, once a private or shameful affair, began to be reimagined as a spiritual, even political act. Slowly, it crept back into public view—not through policy or textbooks, but through pop culture. Celebrities, once expected to hide their pregnancies, started to embrace them more openly. Media began to feature expectant women not just as mothers-to-be, but as icons in their own right. These early appearances planted seeds for a future where the pregnant body could be seen, but as Barbara would later explore, visibility did not always equal representation.
From Icon to Invisible: Motherhood in Media and Fashion
Fashion followed suit. Or perhaps never led. While the industry evolved to embrace androgyny, sensuality, and rebellion, it rarely welcomed pregnancy as part of its vocabulary. A few exceptions stand out, most notably Demi Moore’s 1991 Vanity Fair cover, nude and gloriously pregnant.
It was both iconic and controversial. Some saw power. Others saw obscenity. But even that image was curated, airbrushed, and elevated to artifice.
Barbara did a thorough search of fashion magazine archives, tracing when and how pregnancy or motherhood appeared on covers. She found a few bumps in editorials, a handful of glamorous maternity shoots. “We show the belly,” she told me. “But not what it’s been through.” Not the tears, the stitches, the milk, the mourning. Not the transformation.
Motherhood: A Raw Representation
Even today, maternity fashion remains limited. Irene, one of the women Barbara interviewed, reflected, "I wish brands I already loved had maternity lines. I didn’t want to have to start all over, just adapt what I wore to my new body." Aracelli shared how difficult it was to find clothing that made her feel beautiful as a teenage mother. "Everything felt either childish or matronly. I just wanted to feel like myself." Daniela, after having three children, confessed, "I gave up trying. I wore my husband’s shirts. I didn’t want to spend money on clothes that didn’t feel like me."
Style becomes secondary when comfort and dignity are on the line. And behind each clothing choice was a story of changing identities, limited resources, and unacknowledged needs.
What these women wanted wasn’t simply fashionable maternity wear. They wanted to be seen. They wanted the industry to acknowledge that pregnancy isn’t an interruption to style. It is part of the evolving body story that fashion should dress, not ignore.
To challenge this gap, Barbara created her own archive. For her project, she photographed mothers and daughters, pairing their portraits with handwritten stories of pregnancy, labor, and birth. These weren’t fashion shoots. They were testimonials. Text and body, together.
In these stories, women spoke of joy and trauma, of surgeries and surprises, of feeding babies while working or migrating. They shared how pregnancy altered their style, their bodies, and their self-image. Some found power in maternity wear. Others felt erased by it.
Reading through them, I kept thinking: we dress women. But do we ever ask what stories are we dressing?
The Current State: Disconnection and Commodification
We are the generation with the fewest children in history. Fertility rates have dropped. Careers stretch well into mid-life. Eggs are frozen "just in case." Motherhood has been separated from womanhood. Now anyone can get pregnant, we’re told. The language of reproduction is shifting, and so is its meaning.
Meanwhile, the fertility industry thrives. Ovulation kits, hormone therapy, and embryo design are sold daily. We optimize bodies but don’t support them. “You can even choose the baby’s eye color,” Barbara says. “But we don’t teach girls how to breastfeed.”
Pregnancy has become a market with a narrow lens. Social media offers endless promos for egg freezing and hormonal testing. Discounts flood our feeds. Yet where are the campaigns for breastfeeding circles, postpartum workshops, or doula care? “Why do we invest so much in fertility tech,” Barbara reflects, “but so little in the lived reality of motherhood?”
These tensions are amplified by today’s political climate. Some governments are reinstating binary gender definitions. Online, the #tradwife trend calls women back to domestic roles. In the U.S., the government proposed a $5,000 check to encourage births as rates continue to fall.
Motherhood now sits at the crossroads of ideology and economics. But amid all this, one thing remains missing: real support. Infrastructure that treats motherhood not as a crisis or afterthought, but as an essential, worthy chapter of life.
Why have we devalued pregnancy so deeply that we postpone it until the biological clock is screaming? Why do we focus so much on preserving fertility and so little on preparing women for motherhood with dignity and care?
The result? After being cultured into the #girlboss wave through early adulthood and most of their twenties, many women now find themselves in their 30s and 40s, staring down a quiet realization.
What now? The clock we silenced has started to whisper again. The ambition we were taught to chase came with little space to ask what else we might want. Motherhood was never part of the pitch.
Motherhood: A Return to Origins
What Barbara’s project made clear to me is this: we have not designed a culture that honors motherhood. We’ve commodified it, glamorized it, repressed it, outsourced it, but not held it. Not really.
While Barbara presented her final project, moving us to tears, another student could not contain herself. “I actually delivered a baby,” she said. I looked at her, incredulous. She went on to explain how, before fashion school, she had studied to become a nurse. During one of her clinical rotations, she was told to care for a pregnant woman while the doctor arrived. But the doctor was delayed, and the woman went into labor. The only one present to deliver the baby was her. Though she had never done it before, she helped the woman give birth, catching the baby in her hands and witnessing the miracle of life unfold before her eyes.
We all came from a woman. From blood and stretch marks and instincts. From love and loss and labor. That’s not metaphor. That’s fact.
So perhaps the task now is not to make motherhood cool or even visible. Perhaps the task is to make it real. To bring it back into fashion, not as trend, but as truth.
This essay is only the beginning. Let it be the first thread in a new conversation, a curriculum, a collection. Fashion may not have space for real mothers yet. But we do.
Happy Mother’s Day, to those who mother and to those still deciding what that means.
—Anabella Bergero
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