Are you a "Yummie Mummie"?

iVillage Member
Registered: 08-19-2003
Are you a "Yummie Mummie"?
949
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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iVillage Member
Registered: 12-29-2004
Fri, 02-04-2005 - 12:14pm

Well, I read it, and I have to say, your attitude is great!

Sabina

iVillage Member
Registered: 09-04-1997
Fri, 02-04-2005 - 12:14pm
Oh, I guess that's why I don't stand out in Paris and why they've hired me to teach a course at one of their top universities -- because, despite my unmade up face, I do try to speak the language. In fact, they're requiring me to teach in it.
iVillage Member
Registered: 09-04-1997
Fri, 02-04-2005 - 12:16pm
Because their standard of beauty/looking good/being attractive doesn't include face paint.
Avatar for myshkamouse
iVillage Member
Registered: 03-26-2003
Fri, 02-04-2005 - 12:17pm

Why would you want to cater to that mindset though? There is no way, I'd dress down because someone might not like it that I look good."

Well I don't even see it as dressing down so much as dressing appropriately. If the un-official neighborhood "dress code" is alott more thrown together and "sloppy" than what I'd normally wear, I'd rather just dress more like that, while maintaining my sense of style, which I do...

" I am not interested in being friends with people who are that petty"

I'm not either. Fact is though, first impressions matter to many. And it might not be as easy to establish rapport with someone who thinks you arent 'like them' than someone who makes a quick judgement call that you are. Its not rocket science, its human nature.

"nor do I want to send the message to my kids that they have to put on a false front so other people will like them"

I never put on a false front. I'm simply learning the neighborhood. Have you ever moved? I've lived in 6 different countries now and all over the US. On many moves you have to accomodate your style to fit the culture. I don't see this as much different. The city can feel like another country vs. the burbs...

MM

iVillage Member
Registered: 11-12-2003
Fri, 02-04-2005 - 12:18pm
Thank you. :) They are my angels.
iVillage Member
Registered: 03-31-2003
Fri, 02-04-2005 - 12:23pm

I'd rather not say exactly what school, but it was an R1 state land-grant university in the deep South. That incident happened about 15 years ago, and at that time the "faculty dress code" was no longer published. It's not published now, either, but I know from conversations with friends who still work there that the unwritten code definitely still exists. Crossing the line with impunity (into too casual, too ill-kempt, or too revealing) is not wise if you want tenure, at least in the libraries. Departments will vary in terms of how much weight they will give to it, of course, but you know how touchy the whole image issue can be, especially to directors who are of a certain age.

(Edited to re-phrase.)




Edited 2/4/2005 12:46 pm ET ET by 6721ard
iVillage Member
Registered: 11-12-2003
Fri, 02-04-2005 - 12:24pm
I agree that not everyone thinks "looking nice" entails the same things. But if the 60 yr old woman thinks SHE looks nice with makeup, that's all that matters. And no, I don't think most people wear makeup to look younger. If that were the case noone would wear makeup until they were 30.
iVillage Member
Registered: 03-31-2003
Fri, 02-04-2005 - 12:26pm
I wash mine out immediately with the chlorine-removal shampoo I use on my hair, then wash them out properly in detergent once I get home.
iVillage Member
Registered: 04-02-2003
Fri, 02-04-2005 - 12:30pm
thanks -
If we want our children to feel self confident we have to see the beauty in everyone. We women have to stop picking each other apart so we can take over the world before the men mess it up!
hehehe
Courtney

Courtney

There's a great big beautiful tomorrow shining at the end of every day... there's a great big beautiful tom

iVillage Member
Registered: 01-29-2004
Fri, 02-04-2005 - 12:32pm

ARe you saying that once PNJ ages and matures a little more, she will magically become enlightened and come over to your way of thinking that clothing labels and appearance are not important? That's a little pompous, don't you think?

These things do matter to many men and women. They matter in many, many circles. They once mattered to you. Maybe you're no longer in the same circles or situation or job.

Those things have mattered to me my entire life - and not for the superficial reasons you deluded yourself into adopting: <> I love gorgeous clothes because I love clothes.

And if I couldn't live in the poshest part of Palo Alto, I would at least admit to myself that I was disappointed. I'd adapt, but I wouldn't in turn say that everyone in that part of Palo Alto has screwed up values and they have yet to be enlightened to what's really important in life.

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