Fashion and having kids DO mix!
Guest contributor Mimi Spencer explores ways for mums to feel beautiful again.
Being a mum brings so much joy. And so much stuff. Your house suddenly becomes populated with noise and felt-tips and plastic – and your life? It becomes populated with doubt. Will you ever get back into your pre-kid jeans? Is there a dress in existence that will befriend your upper arms? Is there half a chance you’ll ever feel properly glamorous again?
The problem is of course compounded by the constant sight of those celebrity mothers who ping back into their micro minis and YSL Tribute shoes as soon as they’ve delivered the placenta. They only have to look at a Power Plate and they’re back, wrapped in a Hervé Leger bandage dress and trotting up the red carpet. It’s dispiriting enough to convince us that it’s OK to waddle about in oversize sweaters until Jack and Olivia have started to walk… or gone to school… or left home… Enough I say! What you need are a few failsafe rules to get you back on the fashion track. Here’s how:
1. If your body has changed shape since you had kids, your wardrobe needs to as well. Don’t spend the next two years in denial, waiting for your diet to kick in. Be honest. Look at what you’ve got. A size bigger? OK. Really. You simply have to Buy Right. Dress in the present tense and you’ll look instantly better. Start on the ground floor by investing in clever pants (by this I mean shapewear, not knickers that speak Norwegian; nothing will do more to lift your look… and no one need know!)
2. Beware ageing classics. Motherhood is, naturally enough, an exercise in risk aversion. This is excellent as an evolutionary imperative, but it does mean that dressing can quickly become humdrum and safe, so you need to break out of the comfort zone. Make sure your “stand-by clothes” (the ones you sling on for the school run, halfway between jamming toast in your gob, searching for lost shoes and barking out the four-times-table) are still stylish. Take a look at some of the companies who are getting laid-back, grown-up dressing absolutely right: try Comptoir des Cotonniers, Cos (think H&M with a couple of kids), Gap and Muji. I’d also steer you towards Anthropologie, new in from the US.
3. Don’t, however, attempt to claw your way back into the fast lane of fleeting trends in a single stroke. Admit that you are a little older, possibly wiser, and certainly cooler. Give harem pants and Eighties revivalism a wide berth or the other mums at school will think you’re having a mid-life crisis. Or an affair. Divine instead the broad-stroke trends – the shapes, the colours, the mood - which will give your wardrobe the life it needs. Right now, I’d recommend the recent fixation with jersey dresses, mannish shirts, cocoon coats, slim blazers... Have a look at how Carla Bruni-Sarkozy does it. OK, she’s a supermodel, OK she’s First Lady of France, OK she has her own rail at Dior… but look at how she works that tailoring.
4. Don’t do drab. Do colour! It’s something that Michelle Obama uses brilliantly. Choose a fairly plain staple – a shift, a trench, whatever – but opt for a brighter, bolder, wilder colour. That way you get all the bonuses of clean lines and an uncluttered silhouette, plus a shot of vibrancy to stop people yawning as you walk in the room.
5. Great accessories will pull off the same stunt. A bag doesn’t give two hoots whether you’re 24 or 42, or any multiple thereof. It will love you regardless and run interference for the ravages of galloping time and long lunches. Spend money here (or on gorgeous shoes) and it won’t be wasted. An expensive bag will always give, and leave, the impression of an expensive outfit.
6. Finally, outlaw guilt. Do not feel bad about farming out your offspring in order to spend a bit of time with yourself. A facial, a massage, a bubble bath, a blow-dry, a leg wax… you’ll be surprised how an hour of Me Time can affect your entire look. It will steal the years, believe me.