Confinement — From Pregnancy to Lockdown
Aimee Gilmore, Striped Hat (rubber series) 2018, 9" x 9"
1. From Fashion Week to lockdown
On February 21st, the first cases of coronavirus are registered in Milan. I'm attending Fashion Week and the atmosphere is far from festive. Front-rowers aren't happy about sitting on top of each other. I cough and everyone looks at me uncomfortably. Antonio Mancinelli, senior editor of Marie Claire Italia, will later report a “general sense of guilt among the industry insiders.” [1] I phone my boyfriend and tell him there's an ugly vibe in the city. A minute later I get an email from my son's kindergarten: schools are closing for a week.
Little did I know that that week would soon become weeks, a month, months... Museums, art galleries, theaters, and cinemas also close. I have just attended the press preview of the exhibition Memos: On Fashion in this Millennium; I am supposed to cover it but the museum hosting the exhibition is now closed so nobody can actually see what I am writing about. Fashion in this millennium indeed.
On the 8th of March, International Women's Day, Italy's Prime Minister announces a total lockdown. Everything except supermarkets, grocery stores, and pharmacies is to close. All kinds of social gatherings are now forbidden. Companies are to put employees on remote working. Everyone is to stay at home.
“Why should I put on anything remotely decent when most of my time is spent taking care of my two-year-old son who, like most two-year-olds, comes with drool, diaper leakages, spilled food, and a lot of time spent on the floor?”
2. Stay-at-home fashion, or the lack thereof.
So we stay at home. We don't see anyone except close relatives, flatmates, the occasional Deliveroo guy, and the outlines of our neighbors during the 5 pm balcony flashmobs taking place before the 6 pm bulletin announces the daily death toll. Those who can, work from home; those who can't are put on temporary leave. Those who have children need to fit 24 hours of childcare plus homeschooling into their daily routine.
The lockdown goes on for three months. Over this period I wear three pairs of jeans, four sweaters, two pairs of sweatpants, and an undefined number of my boyfriend's t-shirts. No make-up or jewelry, not even shoes, just some old sneakers when I go out grocery shopping. I wash my hair but don't bother with the hairdryer. In the morning I quickly glance at myself in the mirror to check if my face is still there but I never really look at myself properly. I know only too well what I look like: not pretty, not ugly, just sad, lost. Undefined defines it best.
Throughout the lockdown, social media platforms continue to push sponsored posts of clothing brands and e-shops, but I soon stop checking prices and delivery expenses. While the prairie dress was still going strong, we've suddenly found ourselves living the actual prairie life, minus the prairie. What's the point of a new dress if you don't have a lifestyle to go with it? Why be all dressed up with nowhere to go? Most of all, why should I put on anything remotely decent when most of my time is spent taking care of my two-year-old son who, like most two-year-olds, comes with drool, diaper leakages, spilled food, and a lot of time spent on the floor?
Some people are quite happy about not having to bother with “looking good” anymore. They are finding it liberating, a way of “finally being their true selves.” I don't—I find it sad. That slouchy being in sweatpants is not my true self; it is a self that has to cope with childcare, homecare, work, and an insane amount of worrying. As Angelo Flaccavento writes in Vogue, "We are social beings: our identity is defined by the relationship with others, and dressing is the fastest, most effective means of communication. The dress speaks—often more than it should—but it requires an external gaze and real spaces. Being locked up at home is both its nemesis and its antithesis." [2] I used to say (and to firmly believe) that I didn't dress for other people but only for myself. I have now been forced to reconsider. Though we might not always dress to impress, we do dress in a certain way for other people to see us and, hopefully, appreciate what they see. If no one is likely to see us we don't dress, we just put clothes on. Just like writers might pride themselves on writing mostly for their own pleasure, they would probably not feel very fulfilled if no one ever read them. They might actually reconsider calling themselves a writer.
3. In the media.
“Magazines seem to be under the impression that the quarantine is a gift, finally (finally!) giving mothers (not fathers!) a chance to spend more time, or even all their time, with their kids. ”
Fashion magazines, my daily read over the last decades, have started speaking a language that I don't understand—a language made of "what to wear for a Zoom call," "how to look good on-screen," and "work-from-home style tips." My first reaction to these articles is of pure sadness: Is this it now? The new normal? But sadness is shortly replaced by anger: wait a minute though, this is not normal, it's a pandemic; the world has turned upside down overnight, aren't the “looking good” style tips slightly inappropriate, given the circumstances? I just can't connect. Why re-propose a format that belongs to another, much different kind of life?
Mothers are even more targeted. Magazines seem to be under the impression that the quarantine is a gift, finally (finally!) giving mothers (not fathers!) a chance to spend more time, or even all their time, with their kids. And why not do this in an impeccable, laid-back, cheerful outfit? Enter double spreads of perfectly groomed mothers happily engaging their perfectly groomed kids in Montessori-approved activities. Is this reality? Certainly not. What most mothers are doing in this period is simply trying to make it through each day and, more often than not, this involves plain outfits, untamed hair, dirty children, and very grim faces.
Fashion magazines, and glossy magazines in general, propose inspirational images, not realistic ones. This has always been the case, but is it wise to present an idealized version—staying at home, full-time childcare, Zoom calls, etc.—of the consequences of a pandemic? Why glamorize a simply awful situation? Why re-propose it in an aesthetically pleasing manner? In times in which we are all more vulnerable, what kind of impact does this content have on our self-esteem and, ultimately, on our mental health?
“While motherhood has been in my life since before the lockdown, I had gotten used to having a sartorially safe space of six to eight hours a day, but I don’t have that now:”
4. Phase 2
In Italy, the 4th of May marks the beginning of a so-called Phase 2. Social distancing is still to be observed, but people can now go out and commercial activities gradually re-open. I find myself urged to go back to getting dressed and consequently questioning my wardrobe. Most of what is in my closet is meant for office work, social events, and travel, all things that are still out of the picture. Most importantly, schools are still closed—whatever I choose to wear will still need to take me through a day of ongoing childcare. No high heels, nothing too slinky, nothing too loose, nothing too elegant, nothing too “I'm fed up with mothering.” While motherhood has been in my life since before the lockdown, I had gotten used to having a sartorially safe space of six to eight hours a day, but I don't have that now: I am working, but I am also a full-time, stay-at-home mother, and this kind of lifestyle is very far away from fashion as I know it. Pretty much the entire contents of my closet is off-limits; I am left with the same jeans, sweatpants, sweaters, and boyfriend's t-shirts that I wore during the lockdown.
The clothes-related sponsored posts on social media have become even more aggressive, but still, I don't feel like buying anything. I do want to drop the sweatpants for good and I kind of feel that I owe it to myself to wear something pretty, but what does “pretty” mean to me today? Once again, magazines are not of great help, not to me at least, with their outfit suggestions celebrating “going back to normal” ( aka killer heels, pencil skirts, and blazers) that are a really poor match for my days as a working stay-at-home mum. The epidemic is still going strong, people are still dying, my son can't see other children, and I'm afraid of losing my job: this doesn't exactly call for celebration. We might not be in lockdown anymore but the situation still feels anything but normal. Shouldn't clothes also somehow look different and not just “what we used to wear, plus a mask”? Shouldn't they embrace, perhaps also encourage, a new lifestyle? While some brands are reacting passively, others are using this time to develop new strategies and new products and production processes for the long term. So why are magazines finding it so hard to evolve? Once again, I just can't connect.
5. Motherhood
There was another time in my life in which I found myself forced to completely rethink my style, and that was when I got pregnant. Surprisingly, or perhaps not, back then I felt as little connection to the media as I feel now.
“Hard, depressed pregnancies are still very much a taboo. ”
It has to be said that my pregnancy was a rather bad one. I was depressed throughout it and also after. First of all, it was not planned: I was not ready to become a mother, and getting pregnant didn't make me feel any more so. I had been living a fun and carefree life—I liked my job in fashion, I enjoyed going out with friends, partying, traveling, flirting, and dressing my slim and androgynous body in an alluring way. I didn't want to give up on any of it, especially not the thin and androgynous part. That was particularly a problem because while the rest of it could ideally be preserved, when you get pregnant your body changes and there is nothing that you can do about it. I had always been slim but the moment I got pregnant I started getting huge; not just my belly but my entire body. I had breasts, hips, and a backside—for someone used to wearing high waist trousers in size zero and slinky shirts with no bra, the change was rather unsettling. And I didn't like it. I hated the way I looked just as much as I hated being pregnant.
Hard, depressed pregnancies are still very much a taboo. Magazines, even parenting ones, described a condition that was very different from my own. I was supposed to be feeling great, excited about my changing body and the new life growing inside of it. It was supposed to be a wonderful period! It wasn't, and I felt terrible. I saw pictures of pregnant women, mostly thinner than I was, looking pretty and healthy with their cute bumps. I read articles about pregnancy glow, having gorgeous hair and wonderful skin, and feeling feminine and sexy. I had no such thing as a pregnancy glow (it didn't help that I was pregnant during a Dutch winter), my hair looked hideous, and I felt ill. Most of all, I felt fat; not rounded, not curvy, but fat. Years of anorexia had left their mark: no doubt, before the pregnancy I had been way too obsessed with my figure and had given being thin way too much importance. Deep down I knew that it was my relationship with my body that was wrong, not my size, but still, I felt bad and seeing pregnant celebrities rocking a bikini did not help. I did, however, have very high hopes for the future: my gynecologist had told me my due date on my very first visit and so I knew exactly when this dreadful period was going to end. After that, I would lose weight, feel confident again, and go back to my fun life plus a baby.
My child was born two months early in very critical health. He was put into an intensive care unit where he spent the first three months of his life. I therefore spent my first three months as a mother bending over an incubator and crying. I took pills and wrapped my breasts in a very tight bandage to stop the milk. I lost ten kilos in less than a week; still, my body felt like a complete stranger. There were a lot of new mothers in the intensive care unit and all of them looked pretty much like I did: in despair.
6. Motherhood Fashion
As Michelle Millar Fisher and Amber Winick wrote in a recently published article in Vestoj, "Maternity and fashion have long been uneasy bedfellows. It wasn't until the early twentieth century that maternity clothing was even available for purchase within the commercial fashion system. During 'confinement,' as the Victorians termed pregnancy, women were expected to conceal their growing abdomens within their homes." [3] As a pregnant woman, I longed for confinement. I would have actually been very happy with an imposed lockdown. The combination of being depressed and hating my body made me want to hide from the world, but I couldn't. First, I still had to go to work. Second, I felt a certain external pressure to carry on with my life as usual—even better than usual because pregnancy was, supposedly, such a wonderful thing.
“As a pregnant woman, I longed for confinement. I would have actually been very happy with an imposed lockdown. ”
Since I couldn't confine, I had to get dressed, but none of my clothes fit me anymore. I turned to fashion magazines for some advice: the choice seemed to be between hippy flowery dresses (not exactly ideal for Amsterdam in January), mini-dresses (my legs and ankles were so swollen that I couldn't bear the thought of displaying them), kimonos (charming, but was I really expected to go to work in a kimono?), and a variety of lounge-wear that was probably supposed to spell "comfort" but to me read as "I've given up." On top of this, the general idea was that maternity clothes were a waste of money—it was better to just buy ordinary clothes a couple of sizes bigger and wear them even after the pregnancy. While this might sound like wise, waste-preventing advice, it also conceals a more subtle message: no big deal, keep acting as if everything is normal.
Australian writer Jessica Friedmann wrote a collection of autobiographical stories, Things That Helped (2017), in which she openly talks about postpartum depression. In the essay “Motherhood is a Political Category,” published this year and quoted by Millar Fisher and Winick, she writes, "It is no wonder that motherhood is so pressingly marketed as feminine. It's the feminization of any work that allows us to pay lip service to its importance and then ignore its material conditions completely." [4] There is a considerable difference between maternity clothes and clothes in large sizes: the former are actually designed to dress a pregnant body which, at any size, is rather different from a body that is simply large. Also, maternity clothes are usually sized according to the trimester. As I experienced, having to go from buying XS to buying XL over just a couple of months can be extremely unsettling; buying something in size 28-40 weeks makes you feel a lot better, less conscious about your growing body, or at least more aware of the reason it's growing. Unfortunately, when I found this out it was already too late—my pregnancy was over within a month.
When my child was finally able to leave the hospital, things certainly got better on a general level.
Less so, however, from a sartorial point of view. Magazines had filled me with expectations: how nice it would feel to have your waistline back, how heavenly it would be to wear normal clothes again (funny, because those were the same magazines that suggested not to ditch normal clothes in the first place), and how wonderful it would be to go out all nicely dressed with your super-cute baby. The truth could not have been more different.
“Without necessarily having to go into depression, motherhood is a delicate matter that everyone experiences differently. It cannot be accomplished simply by dressing the part. ”
All of my pre-pregnancy clothes were too small, I felt tired and clumsy, pushing a stroller made me feel awkward, my belly was still big, and the wound caused by the C-section prevented me from wearing anything tight. And my hair still looked hideous. I was anxious to go back to being my fashionable self but I also felt compelled to look a bit more like a mother. But what should a mother look like? I had no idea. I wasn't working, I hardly ever left the house, I had to buy some new clothes whether I liked it or not, but I didn't know what to buy.
Without necessarily having to go into depression, motherhood is a delicate matter that everyone experiences differently. It cannot be accomplished simply by dressing the part. Looking back at my uneasy relationship with magazines during pregnancy and my early days as a mother, what made me feel disconnected wasn't just the unrealistically glamorous version of maternity that they depicted but the fact that they seemed to positively ignore that motherhood is first and foremost a revolution, and that revolutions aren't easy. All in all, it wasn't very different from what happened during the peak of the pandemic: those "quarantine is a gift" articles were dangerously similar to the “pregnancy is magical” ones; the work-from-home style tips felt just as ephemeral as the flowery, kimono-y maternity clothing suggestions, and the “back to normality” pieces sounded very much like the "how wonderful it is to have your life (and your waistline) back" ones. None of these articles seem to acknowledge the revolution at their origin.
“I still see motherhood as a very physical matter that, like all things physical, calls for authenticity, and I am also neither prepared nor willing to abandon the glamourous aspects of my life and closet. ”
7. Things that helped
Aimee Gilmore, Pink Socks (rubber series), 2018, 9" x 9"
I do wish I had read Friedmann's Things That Helped when I was pregnant. It would probably have made me feel less lonely and less wrong. Perhaps it would have also inspired me to write my own
list of things that helped, though there would probably not have been enough to fill a book. One of the things that did help was textiles. While I didn't seem able to find anything to wear that made me feel pretty, I did at one point discover that simple clothes in very high-quality fabrics made me feel good, or at least better. I was lost in terms of shapes and sizes, but organic cotton, soft linen, merino wool, and anything that felt nice on the skin also helped me to feel better in my skin.
After a very bad start in motherhood, things got easier when my son started daycare and I went back to work. On the first days of kindergarten, all the new mommys including me were tiptoeing around in plain clothes and flat shoes. After a couple of months, we were all doing the school drop-off in high heels and red lipstick. Some women have no problem fitting motherhood into their style and personality; some actually feel more accomplished, more fulfilled, more feminine, and the change of style that naturally occurs for practical reasons simply follows a positive flow. This has not been my case.
I still find it hard to be simultaneously a mother, a fashion professional and, well, myself. I am aware that this has a lot to do with an internal struggle with maternity but I also think that society and the expectations it places on women doesn’t make it any easier. I still see motherhood as a very physical matter that, like all things physical, calls for authenticity, and I am also neither prepared nor willing to abandon the glamourous aspects of my life and closet. The best I could do, up till now, was to keep the two things separated: motherly with my child, fashion-y without him—a way to explore motherhood without ditching my old self. I enjoyed getting dressed for work in the morning, coming back home, and changing into something snuggly to tend to my child's needs. Time and space, or times and spaces in the plural, played a pivotal role in helping me define my new identity. But times and spaces have now been crumpled up.
Once again, like when I was pregnant, I have turned to high-quality textiles, hoping that luxury fabrics will help me navigate this time of confusion in a way that’s both practical and, if not elegant, at least not tragic either. I have taken the habit of pairing my jeans with a silk top or cashmere knit on those rare occasions in which I manage to go out without my child. A simple high-quality garment makes me feel better and more put-together. It feels just as comforting as it did on my wounded pregnant and postpartum body. When I get back home and back to childcare, I change into one of my old t-shirts. This simple gesture of changing my top also allows me to mentally separate the time for myself from the time with my child, hoping to one day find a better balance but also to see struggling, imperfect women and mothers like myself better represented by the fashion industry and lifestyle media.
Notes
[1] Mancinelli, Antonio. “Parlare di moda tra Coronavirus e provocazione dei "trend": racconto delle sfilate metaforiche.” Marie Claire Italia, 23 february 2020, marieclaire.com.
[2] Flaccavento, Angelo. “Necessario è il Superfluo.” Vogue Italia, vol. Aprile 2020, 2020, p. 26.
[3] Millar Fisher, Michelle and Amber Winick. “A Fucking Raw Deal: Designing Motherhood the All-American Way.” Vestoj No. 9, 2020 http://vestoj.com/a-fucking-raw-deal/
[4] Friedmann, Jessica. “Motherhood is a Political Category.” Human Parts, 10 May 2019, Medium.com.
