Charman wrote in Apollo of such images, they nevertheless “conform to the glossy conventions.” Progressive though they may seem, however, as Ms. That phase reached its apogee with Beyoncé’s 2017 photo shoot/announcement that she was pregnant with twins, a heavily art-directed series of pictures that seemed to encompass such references as Botticelli’s Venus and a renaissance Madonna. (Remember Princess Diana’s ruffled smocks and sailor dresses during her pregnancies in the early and mid-1980s?) At least until Demi Moore shocked the world by posing naked and heavily pregnant for the cover of Vanity Fair in 1991, inaugurating the age of the pregnancy art portrait.Īnd that period extended through such belly-baring covers as Cindy Crawford, naked and pregnant on W Britney Spears, naked and pregnant for Harper’s Bazaar in 2006 and Serena Williams, naked and pregnant on Vanity Fair in 2017. That in turn gave way to the tent dress compromise. That began in 1952, when Lucille Ball became pregnant during the filming of “ I Love Lucy” and famously forced her producers to write her impossible-to-ignore condition into the script, and onto everyone’s screens (though they still couldn’t use the actual word “pregnant”), as dramatized in the recent film “Being the Ricardos.” It revealed, she said, how paintings and other art forms moved from showing pregnant bodies “as affirmations of paternalistic structures of inheritance and power” to trying to pretend they didn’t actually exist (or the condition of being pregnant didn’t) to putting pregnancy front and center as an increasingly idealized state. At least until the child emerged and the woman was transformed into a paragon of pure maternal selflessness. It had become a symbol of our base desires and a sign of female instability and lack of control and thus something best kept behind closed doors and (literally) under wraps. Tsaliki said, it had been transformed into a shameful state, one connected not so much to the sacred as the profane. In ancient times, pregnancy was venerated and exhibited, seen as a physical embodiment of women’s connection to mother earth, but by the Middle Ages and medieval Christendom, Ms. The pregnant body, after all, has been celebrated, policed, hidden away and considered problematic for centuries. That she can be “autonomous, powerful and herself, even while carrying a life.” She’s connecting the right to dress how you like with all sorts of other, more constitutional rights. “She’s saying, ‘I’m a person still, and I’m my person.’” Ms. (They also explain why this particular “get-the-look” role modeling has been so disproportionately exciting for so many.)īy dressing to showcase her pregnant belly, and in a way that has nothing to do with traditional maternity wear, Rihanna is modeling an entirely opposite reality. Tsaliki calls “the aestheticization of the body and the monitoring of women’s waistlines” and (3) modern politics.Īll of which take this particular pregnancy dress story far beyond mere “get the look” role modeling. The result is a dizzying swirl of contemporary phenomena, including: (1) celebrity culture, in which we increasingly take our consumer and behavioral cues from boldface names (2) what Ms. It’s just all couched in the familiar trope of the “celebrity bump watch.” Sneaky, right? She’s making a “totally transgressive and highly political statement,” said Liza Tsaliki, a professor of media studies and popular culture at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens in Greece. In dressing to confront the world with the physical reality of her pregnancy so consistently, Rihanna has gone way past just making a fashion statement. But, really, the style choices are just the beginning.
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