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Excerpted from Conceiving Histories: Trying For Pregnancy, Past and Present, by Isabel Davis. Reprinted with permission from the MIT Press. © 2025. 

In her 1979 memoir, the novelist Naomi Mitchison writes about dressing up and its decline since the 1930s as collateral damage in the move to “the present idea that anything goes, so we can always and everywhere be in fancy dress.” It’s mostly true now, too, that anything goes. You have to go all out at fancy-dress parties to make it clear you’re dressed up.

Going all out, I once tried to go to a fancy-dress party as a Swan Vesta matchbox, wearing an elaborate cardboard contraption painted with a lot of time and effort. The party turned out to be on a roof that could be accessed only through a window too small to fit the matchbox. So I went to the party wearing the clothes I had on underneath the costume.

“What have you come as?”

“Um, as an invisible matchbox? Can’t you see?”

It’s true, lots of things “go,” but still not quite everything. Mitchison overstates it. Haute couture catwalks couldn’t show unwearable fashion if everything “went.” It’s mostly not acceptable to go about daily life dressed as a matchbox or wearing a bird’s nest, rubbish, or lobster claws on one’s head, even if it is designed by Dior. And for those who aren’t pregnant, bump-baring maternity wear is currently unavailable. In the 1930s, Mitchison remembers, “pretty maternity dresses” ended up “in the acting box.” Yet even now, maternity wear is strictly for pregnancy or let’s pretend.

There was one amazing year, though, 1793, when the pregnant look did “go,” and anyone could wear it. You could buy a false bump called the Pad and wear it under a flouncy dress with a pushup cleavage. London’s Morning Herald newspaper notes that “Pads continue to be worn; and on account of these the dress is still a loose gown of white muslin flounced in front, appearing to be put on with the negligence permitted to the supposed situation of the wearers. A narrow sash ties it at the waist.” This wasn’t quite the little white empire-line muslin dress familiar from Jane Austen costume dramas, but it was heading that way from the exoskeleton corsetry of the ancien régime. You could put on this pregnant outfit and walk around the fashionable districts of town.

The 21st century has seen a trend for pads, fillers, and surgery to enlarge lips, breasts, and buttocks, but we don’t yet have off-the-peg belly pads as they did in 1793. Celebrity gossip keeps a close eye on body fakery. Has she or hasn’t she had her nose, breasts, bum done? The charge of feigning pregnancy has an edge that allegations of other cosmetic enhancements do not. Meghan Markle, Beyoncé Knowles, Katie Holmes, and others have been accused of faking pregnancies. These duplicitous celebrities, so the rumor mill grinds, have hired mysterious surrogates to do their gestating work. Suspiciously, a dress folds in the wrong place, a bump is too low or high or slips down, a shadow looks photoshopped to hide the join of a prosthetic bump. The bloggers and columnists, clickbait news sites, and social media influencers promise forensic detail: the way clothes move, the anatomy of the pregnant body, the tone of her denials, the baby’s resemblances. The fear is that celebrity women are winning fraudulent membership in the sacred motherhood club, holding on to the perfect bodies which real mothers are prepared to sacrifice on entry. Who is and isn’t in the club is policed.