Maternity Fashion Is Having a Cultural Moment

Recently, Anne Hathaway hit the streets of New York promoting The Odyssey in a red peplum maternity jumpsuit, worn completely backwards, totally accidental. Fashion watchers clocked it fast, but instead of the mortified-celebrity-runs-for-cover thing, she handled it with her signature grace and humour, laughed, kept walking, red heels and all.

Drop-waist, peplum, bump on full display, zero shapeless smock in sight. Intentional or not, the result was the same: no hiding, no fixing, just a bump front and centre like it owns the room. Honestly, the mishap did more for maternity fashion than most stylists manage on purpose. And a moment like that only lands because of how far maternity fashion has had to travel to get here.

Here’s a (Slightly Infuriating) History of Maternity Wear

For most of modern history, pregnancy dressing wasn’t about style; it was about disappearing. Victorian and early-20th-century women were expected to retreat into “confinement” once they started showing, and their clothing followed suit- loose, dark, deliberately unremarkable. The message was clear: be pregnant, just don’t be seen being pregnant.

Things shifted, slowly. Lane Bryant’s Page Boy label pioneered ready-to-wear maternity clothing in the late 1930s, offering women more than just let-out dresses and safety pins. By the 1950s and 60s, maternity fashion existed as its own category, but it was still built around concealment, smocks, empire waists, anything that hid the shape rather than followed it.

The Cover That Changed Everything

Then came 1991. Demi Moore posed nude, seven months pregnant, on the cover of Vanity Fair. It was scandalous at the time, some newsstands even refused to carry it, but it changed something for good. Suddenly a pregnant body could be shown, not hidden away.

From there, it was a slow crawl through the 2000s and 2010s: bodycon maternity dresses, bump-hugging activewear, the normalization of the pregnant red carpet look, until we landed here, in 2026, where a backwards jumpsuit and a visible bump are a fashion statement instead of a spectacle.

The Bump As the Accessory

That’s really the whole shift in one line. The bump used to be the thing you designed around. Now it’s the thing you design for. Peplums that cradle it, belts that sit just above it, necklines cut low enough that the jewellery and the bump share the spotlight. Maternity dressing has stopped asking “how do I hide this” and started asking “how do I style this.”

Once the bump stops being something to hide, style doesn’t take a leave of absence; it just makes room for one more.

Turns Out, the Bump Is a Whole Movement

Anne Hathaway’s version of it was accidental. Others have been more deliberate, but the message across all of them is the same- the bump doesn’t need to be managed, it needs to be styled.

Margot Robbie spent her first pregnancy alternating between polka-dot Alaïa on the Wimbledon lawn and a bare, unbothered bump on vacation in Sardinia, proof that “stealth maternity style” doesn’t have to mean shapeless. Jennifer Lawrence took the opposite approach and made it work just as well: quiet-luxury maternity dressing through her second pregnancy, all belted trench dresses and Bottega Veneta, bump styled in, not styled around.

Then there’s Beyoncé, whose 2017 pregnancy announcement, shot like a Renaissance painting, remains the gold standard for turning an expecting body into iconography rather than an inconvenience.

Closer home, Kareena Kapoor Khan brought the same energy to Bollywood over a decade ago, stepping out in fitted silhouettes at a time when Bollywood still treated visible pregnancy as something to shoot around, not show off, and effectively pushed Bollywood to finally catch up. Kiara Advani picked up that baton in 2025, flaunting her bump on the Met Gala red carpet before welcoming her daughter, Saraayah.

None of this is really about jumpsuits or peplums. It’s about who gets to decide what a pregnant body is allowed to look like in public, and increasingly, the answer is…the woman wearing it. Nine months is a long time to spend hiding. If the bump is going to be there anyway, it may as well be the best-dressed part of the outfit!