When I spoke of this mystery to a friend who was entering her second trimester, she seemed equally perplexed by it, and so we decided to do a bit of field research. First, we went to a non-maternity store. She tried on a faux-wrap top with enough room between her torso and the fabric to easily conceal a small toaster oven. I tried on a peasant blouse that had beautiful detailing but outlined my waist about as well as a potato sac would have.

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A salesgirl wandered our way. "Aren't those adorable?" she asked. "We just got them in."

My friend and I looked at each other. "Don't you think we look kind of pregnant in them?" I asked. The salesgirl stepped back to get a better view. She tensed her brow and seemed to give the matter careful consideration.

"Not at all," she concluded. "This new style is very delicate and sweet. Everyone just wants to look like a girl this season."

A ripe, lactating girl, I thought.

Utterly nonplused, I decided to see what a buyer at a Chicago maternity boutique had to say. While she couldn't shed much light on the ballooning of women's fashion, her take on the maternity issue was that pregnant women didn't want to feel like big cows anymore; they didn't want to feel the way their mothers must have felt in all those terrible sailor dresses. Instead, they wanted to wear clothes that made them feel hot, fit, sexy and irresistible. Interesting, I thought: definitely not the adjectives I would have used to describe my mood as my hormones skyrocketed
"Everyone just wants to look like a girl this season."
A ripe, lactating girl, I thought. and my digestive system slowed to a crawl.

I do think she was onto something, however, with her "these aren't your mother's maternity clothes" remark. Like most things, fashion trends, both women's fashion and maternity fashion, seems to operate on a pendulum; in our constant quest to get away from what's familiar, we run head-on into fads that are new but counterintuitive. The trend in this case may not mean much to non-pregnant women wearing maternity-ish clothes. At worst, they'll face some embarrassing encounters with clueless friends. What's so frustrating about it for pregnant women is that while most of us wouldn't mind a brief reprieve from body-obsession and unflattering styles, a time-out from the suffocating sense of always being on display, pregnancy now only seems to offer a new variation on the same old theme. Pregnant women today find themselves facing a new kind of competitiveness, not who has the flattest abs or the thinnest thighs, but whose bulge looks the cutest in a skin-tight mini-tee with "knocked up" written across it.

It seems a shame that in our uncritical embrace of the unfamiliar, women are presented with fewer and fewer fashion options that complement rather than contradict the shape and state in which they find themselves. But maybe women today aren't so different from the ladies Poiret decked in pantaloons and kimonos. Maybe the urge behind all fashion is the desire for costume; the desire to play and to pretend the body beneath the clothes is something new, constantly re-made, something slightly less familiar than the body, pregnant or not, we know and (sometimes) love.