Are you a "Yummie Mummie"?
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| Tue, 02-01-2005 - 2:19pm |
I thought this article was interesting (warning - it is a bit lengthy). . . especially on the heels of the "you look like a mom" thread. While I can completely understand one's desire to remain "attractive" post-kids, some of these women are IMO taking things too far (who deliberately puts on heels if they don't have to while making breakfast?)
If you're in your 30s, you shouldn't try to look like you're in high school. You're not. While we don't need to "let go" of our youthfulness, we also shouldn't desperately try to hang onto it by clawing at it with our fingernails. Whatever happened to aging gracefully?? You may look great in your low rise Sevens, but that doesn't mean you should pair them with a belly bearing top cut down to there.
What do you think of this "trend" of hottie mommies? Can a mom be "hot" without looking like a teenager?
Today, more mommies are hotties, too
By Olivia Barker
USA Today
Irene Slatest, 41, has been wearing basically the same uniform since her 20s: "I'm all about the low-cut , the 3-inch heels, the tight clothes."
But as she fixed breakfast one morning at home in suburban Long Beach, N.Y., her daughter, Victoria, noticed something amiss. Hair, makeup and form-fitting outfit intact and impeccable, Slatest nonetheless stood at the stove in ... fuzzy slippers.
"Mom, you look like a housewife!" Slatest recalls her 7-year-old exclaiming.
"I was like, 'Oh, my God, we can't have this,' " Slatest says. So she finished making eggs in heels.
Mom has come a long way, baby. Of course, she's far beyond the ironed and buttoned-up June Cleaver archetype. But increasingly she's also moving past the soccer-mom look of the '80s and '90s. She pays attention to trends, assiduously avoiding anything pleated, tapered or high-waisted. She indulges in a nip here, a tuck there. She stays fit, even buff.
Mom, it seems, doesn't want to check her sexuality at the picket-fence gate anymore.
" 'Yummy mummies' we call them in Australia," says Anna Johnson, the author of "Three Black Skirts: All You Need to Survive." "They have kitten heels, cleavage, and they don't cut their hair short." Johnson, 38 and pregnant for the first time, hopes to follow the Prada-lined path blazed by sultry moms such as Uma Thurman. "You're handing your body and your life over to your baby, but you don't have to hand your style over to your baby."
Minivan-spurning matriarchs abound in recent pop culture. Stifler's mom (Jennifer Coolidge) proved quite the seductress in the "American Pie" movies. Stacy's mom (model Rachel Hunter) had it going on, complete with red bikini, in 2003's Fountains of Wayne video. The character of Regina George's mom in last year's "Mean Girls" ("SNL's" Amy Poehler) flaunted her breast implants from beneath her figure-hugging tracksuit.
But perhaps the epitome of the mildly naughty nurturer is "Desperate Housewives' " Susan Mayer (Teri Hatcher), who readily puts her svelte self on display. Indeed, Hatcher, 40, a single mom herself, coyly poses for the February covers of Harper's Bazaar (in a dress that dips below the waist) and laddie magazine FHM (in plunging lingerie). She even made Mr. Blackwell's best-dressed list for 2004.
Credit "Desperate Housewives" for fixing the spotlight on come-hither clothing for the post-lactating set. The look came into stark and sparkly view on last week's Golden Globes stage, when Hatcher and her largely fortysomething co-stars, including fellow mom Felicity Huffman in a cleavage-hoisting sheath, outshone some of their younger Hollywood colleagues.
"If we are inspiring women to push the edge of the envelope a little bit ... how fabulous is that?" says the show's costume designer, Cate Adair, herself a mom.
But the show also is reflecting recent cultural changes. "We were in a different place five years ago," Adair says. "Some of the rules have started to get broken." So as low-rise jeans have become the norm, as people have stopped blinking at the sight of a bare belly, the image of a mom in a miniskirt and lip gloss simply seems less scandalous.
Flinging off asexual armor
Historically, though, motherhood has been about "not looking like you're on the market," Johnson says. The net effect was to go from being "a Camaro to a Volvo." Consider Erin Brockovich. "One of the reasons everybody found her so shocking was that she was a mom wearing a push-up bra and a baby on her hip, which seemed like an inappropriate accessory," Johnson says. The message? "Women can have it all, but they can't dress like they have it all."
So standard mom clothes serve as a kind of asexual armor. Of course, mom-as-siren and mom-as-schlump occupy two extremes of the style spectrum; the majority of moms breeze from the shopping center to the schoolyard looking perfectly respectable.
Now, though, "mom style" is no oxymoron in part because it's so much easier to achieve, for both women in the workplace and those who stay home. For moms accustomed to spending money mostly on their kids, fashion has become affordable and accessible as mass-market retailers such as Target offer a little edge. And for those who need outside help, there's the forthcoming book "Frumpy to Foxy in 15 Minutes Flat: Style Advice for Every Woman," which devotes a chapter to rescuing mousy moms from their unhip selves.
The shrinking generation gap, including the fact that moms increasingly gravitate toward their daughters' closets and jewelry boxes, is "one of the biggest changes in consumer behavior in the past five years," says Marshal Cohen of the NPD Group, a market research firm. These women "cross over. They're interested in current styles, not styles specific to an age. They don't want to dress in their mothers' housedresses anymore.
"Clothing and style does not discriminate according to age like it used to," Cohen says.
The gym, plastic surgery
Take Michelle Card, who strode through Tampa International Airport recently wearing a deep tan and an even deeper V-neck shirt. With her long blond layers, French pedicure and low-slung jeans, Card, 33, "looks more like a teenager," concludes one of her two sons, Matthew, 10.
A lot of her friends seem similarly more suited to sit in a high school class, not teach one. "They don't want to look older just because they're moms," says Card, an executive at a nonprofit organization in Hernando Beach, Fla. "They don't want to let it go." Among the tools of this single mom's maintenance routine? Microdermabrasion, facials and trips to the gym.
In the past, the extra 15 pounds that pregnancy padded on just "wouldn't budge," says Sue Fleming, a personal trainer and author of the new "Buff Moms: The Complete Guide to Fitness for All Mothers." (The cover features a woman with a baby in one hand, a dumbbell in the other.) Fleming helps her mom clients drop the weight in as little as six months. "They look great," Fleming says. "They don't have to have that 'I've had babies now I've lost my body' mentality."
Some moms take a more permanent approach to body sculpting. In the past year, Laurie Casas, a plastic surgeon in suburban Glenview, Ill., performed around 70 percent of her surgical operations (a quarter of which were breast augmentations) on mothers with children under the age of 18; 90 percent of her nonsurgical procedures, including Botox injections, fillers and skin peels, were done on that same group. Though Casas has had maternal patients for 15 years, what has changed in the past five is that moms no longer wince at the thought of spending thousands on themselves.
"I haven't seen the guilt. I see the 'I deserve this,' " says Casas, who also is the national spokeswoman for the American Society for Aesthetic Plastic Surgery. "It's not an entitlement but almost a feeling of 'I'm worth it, I'm important enough.' "
"Hello, sexy"
"There's a lot of competitive mommyhood right now," says Jane Buckingham, author of "The Modern Girl's Guide to Life." "We're all trying to look the best we can, even if we have spit-up on our shoulder." Buckingham, 36, a mother of two who splits her time between Beverly Hills and Manhattan, concedes that on days when her cute clothes linger in the laundry and her not-yet-showered hair is in a ponytail, she's "too embarrassed" to walk inside her son's preschool to drop him off. So she lets him out in the alley.
Linda Elton, 44, started working out with Fleming last August, nearly three months after giving birth to twin girls. "I don't think you have to stop living just because you become a mother," says Elton, a marketing consultant who lives in Babylon, N.Y. She still gets her hair cut and colored every four weeks. And she still plans to buy a motorcycle someday.
Meanwhile, she's tooling her twins around in a "beautiful" champagne Lincoln Navigator, even though her own mom was nudging her toward the more vanilla Honda Odyssey. Elton's reaction? "You're talking to somebody who had three Corvettes and then an Audi, and now you want to put me in a minivan?"
"I just felt, 'I'm too cool for a van,' " she says.
Ask Katie Rowand of Ashburn, Va., to envision a mom, and she sees a woman who's polished but prim, sporting "a khaki, button-down jacket and a bob haircut. Maybe some bangs, maybe a headband." And maybe behind the wheel of a Volvo station wagon. Rowand's typical outfit, on the other hand, is a pair of Seven jeans and a snug top, anchored by pointy flats or heels. Her car is a Land Rover. And Rowand, who's about to turn 28, has a 5-month-old daughter.
"I'm still young enough that I shouldn't be in a bar with a turtleneck on, you know?"
Sometimes, though, situations do call for comfort over, say, cleavage. During last weekend's nor'easter, Slatest hunkered down, in her sweats and bare face. As she cooked dinner, her husband, Steve, wrapped his arms around her and cooed, "Hello, sexy."
"I laughed and said, 'You've got to be kidding — or else really hungry.' He said no, I'm sexy all the time."

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I am an academic librarian in the south and I'm wearing jeans as I type this. The only time I have ever worn a suit is on the day I interviewed. I usually wear pants kakhis, crop pants, etc, or jeans and a nice sweater or shirt. I wear a skirt or dress maybe once a week, and only wear hose in the winter. In the summer I wear sandals only, but not Birkenstocks. God I hate the stereotype of the librarian who wears ugly shapless clothes and no makeup. I can assure you that almost all my colleages dres stylishly, wear makeup and get our hair and nails done regularly. In fact we look much more stylish than most of the female faculty on campus.
Susan
You might not really be available, but I bet the men you pass on the street think you should be, knowing how hard you try! I'm a newbie here, and I haven't gotten around to posting a picture yet, but I've thought about it. BUT, if I have to post a picture, then so does everybody else posting on this thread, right? Fair's fair...
I just have average looks. I'm very tall, so I stand out automatically because of that. But I'm not anti-cosmetics at all. In fact, today I'm going to the beauty parlor for color and a cut.
I'll think about posting a photo. I wanna see if any other posters are willing, first. I do get where you're coming from with your posts. I just think it's excessive not to understand how some women don't get into cosmetics. A lot of people think cosmetics look awful, and they think that "looking one's best" isn't about cosmetics.
Sabina
I guess it's all a matter of degree.
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That's an interesting philosophy, that being a good Christian is less than the total of your life. I had always had the notion that being a good Christian is something much more than the total of my life.
I can't resist a little tweak here (apologies to LTB for quoting scripture):
And it came to pass, that, as they went in the way, a certain man said unto him, Lord, I will follow thee whithersoever thou goest.
And Jesus said unto him, Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests; but the Son of man hath not where to lay his head.
And he said unto another, Follow me. But he said, Lord, suffer me first to go and bury my father.
Jesus said unto him, Let the dead bury their dead: but go thou and preach the kingdom of God. And another also said, Lord, I will follow thee; but let me first go bid them farewell, which are at home in my house.
And Jesus said unto him, No man, having put his hand to the plough, and looking back, is fit for the kingdom of God.
And Felicia said, Lord, I will follow thee, but hang on a minute, this desert air and sun is so harsh on the complexion, so I'll be right with you as soon as I moisturize and apply a light, tasteful touch of foundation and I'm just not presentable unless I outline my eyes. . . .
Luke 9:57-62+
But I do care about how I look. I do get my hair cut every six weeks because I love my hair. I like getting pedicures -- and in fact, am sporting pedicured feet right now. I like wearing new clothes. I like living in a clean and orderly house. If I didn't care about my appearance, I wouldn't have forked over a monthly gym fee so that I could go work out. I work out because I like feeling healthy -- not because some fashion magazine says I need look like a twig.
I also just don't care if **you** or someone else thinks I can be improved by wearing makeup to pick up DS. Caring what other people think about me is not my priority anymore. Other things are.
mom_writer
Yes, he's better and his personality returned. (We were hoping it would be like chemo where you lose your hair and you get a different texture or color when it grows back in. No such luck.)
Dh just took him to preschool so I have two hours to mentally gear up for the weekend. This kid wears us down!
(I can tell you aren't a dog person. If you think the way my little boys kiss is gross, you should see what the dog does!)
I don't know how to view it. I checked your profile - is that where it is?
Sabina
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