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 - 12:35pm
Yes, the 60YO is entitled to wear makeup if it makes her feel better. But what if she goes totally overboard with it and starts to look silly? And what if a woman (or a guy) goes REALLY overboard with it? Then you have..... Michael Jackson (LOL)!!!
iVillage Member
Registered: 06-27-1998
Fri, 02-04-2005 - 12:38pm

I'm sorry.


PumpkinAngel

iVillage Member
Registered: 03-31-2003
Fri, 02-04-2005 - 12:39pm

That's exactly what I was saying. Walking around looking unkempt or ultra-casual (or even the uber-earth-mother look we're discussing here) is often less acceptable in libraries than it is in other academic departments, because it perpetuates the myth. However, seen collectively, you have to admit that we are hardly fashion poster-children. A visit to any ALA will make that all too clear. (Of course, our salaries don't help in that regard, either.)

I'm a tech services person myself, and even so I've very seldom encountered libraries where jeans were allowed unless there was grunt work to be done that day. IME, reference folks tend to be held to a higher standard that those of us who toil behind the curtain.

Edited 2/4/2005 12:59 pm ET ET by 6721ard




Edited 2/4/2005 1:08 pm ET ET by 6721ard
iVillage Member
Registered: 03-31-2003
Fri, 02-04-2005 - 12:44pm
Unwritten rule, but it was enforced.
iVillage Member
Registered: 03-27-2003
Fri, 02-04-2005 - 12:44pm

Agree again. I think makeup polishes a look nicely, and there is nothing wrong with a woman of ANY age wearing it. Heck my 76yo grandmother still does her hair and puts on her lipstick each day-and she lives out in the Alaskan wilderness (literally) where there are NO other families for MILES and MILES. She does it because she enjoys looking nice for HERSELF. Not because she feels the need to subscribe to some cookie cutter feminine ideal, but because she enjoys it.


I dont necessarily care what others think about my looks, but I like looking good-for me. I assume that will hold true when I'm 60 as well as now when I'm pushing 40.


Dj

"Now when I need help, I look in the mirror" ~Kanye West~

iVillage Member
Registered: 01-29-2004
Fri, 02-04-2005 - 12:48pm
I think that's wonderful you're teaching a summer class at a top university in Paris. But that's not what I was discussing. Sneakers and a fanny pack make one stand out in the streets of Paris. I would try to assimilate in other ways beyond language. But that's just me. I couldn't care what other tourists do, and I found that most tourists tried to fit in rather than stand out like you seem determined to do. More power to you. Who needs to assimilate anyway?
iVillage Member
Registered: 03-27-2003
Fri, 02-04-2005 - 12:48pm

"Embarrassment, shame, humiliation." What is embarrassing, shameful or humiliating about being a tourist? When in Paris I made every effort to use as much French as I could muster- but since I never officially studied it, no one was fooled. And I wasn't trying to fool them. Nor was I trying to assimilate. I was just trying to speak to them in their own language as foreign tourists try to speak English to me when they visit here. If the phrase book I was holding wasn't clue enough, my choppy phrasing and thick-accent pronounciation did it. I've been to many countries and since I'm not talented at languages, I have not become fluent in the various languages and must always rely on a phrasebook- sometimes on actually pointing to a phrase in the book when they couldn't understand me.

But I never felt shame, embarrasment or humiliation at obviously being a tourist. Why would I? There is nothing shameful in visiting other countries. And when you visit- you are a tourist. I'm a tourist when I leave New England! I understand wanting to communicate with people in their own language to the extent possible. It would be rude for me to assume that anyone who isn't in an English-speaking country speaks English. Many do- but it's not a polite assumption to make. But shame in simply BEING from the U.S.? Why? Even at the height of political differences, many people have been quick to say "it's not YOU we dislike- it's your President".

iVillage Member
Registered: 08-29-2002
Fri, 02-04-2005 - 12:51pm

Ime, the locals never mind the attire of the tourists unless it is blatantly disrespectful (short skirts or shorts and tank top in a church in Spain or Italy, for example). What tends to irk them more is a tourist trying desperately to pretend they are just another local blending into the crowd. The obvious tourists (the ones in jeans and sneakers) who make a good attempt to speak the local language are the usually the ones most enthusiastically greeted and helped by the locals because they are clearly happy to be tourists (and locals LOVE tourist dollars) AND respectful enough to at least attempt the language.

Laura (who once turned up in Milan in dowdy maternity clothes with a 9 week old in tow and was greeted enthusiastically by all and sundry including the most chic patrons of a chic restaurant at 10pm with said infant in tow :-))

iVillage Member
Registered: 03-31-2003
Fri, 02-04-2005 - 12:52pm
In my experience that's only universally true in South Florida. I've seen lots of hosiery being worn in summertime in Jacksonville and Tallahassee.
iVillage Member
Registered: 03-31-2003
Fri, 02-04-2005 - 12:58pm
Giggle. I *love* water slides. I like them better than DS does, actually. I'm dying to try the new Blaster that's opening at Typhoon Lagoon this year.

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