Bumps in the front row, babies backstage and multi-tasking mothers steering some of the week’s biggest moments. At 33 weeks pregnant, Vogue Scandinavia's managing editor Clare McInerney discovered a different side to Copenhagen Fashion Week SS27 – and set out to question how pregnancy, parenthood and the fashion industry coexist in Scandinavia
Before every show at fashion week, there’s a pause as pregnant as I am. Once you've found your seat, there comes an indeterminate stretch of time to sit and observe the mad-dash of headset-clad staff and frenzied final arrivals. It was during one such moment at last week’s Copenhagen Fashion Week SS27 that a crisis unfolded. The press release I had placed on the bench beside me caught the breeze of a passing pleated skirt, flitting into the air in slow motion before settling directly on the runway.
Alarm bells. The 33-week-old growth at my front has rendered a forward-bend impossible. Squatting down and scooping the rogue paper in my (modest) heels posed the risk of me never rising vertically again. I pictured myself simply accepting my fate: lying there, helpless, before being climbed and overstepped by a procession of Stine Goya models. Cue Stanford Blatch, gasping from the sidelines: “Oh my God, she’s fashion roadkill!”
Thankfully, a quick-thinking PR swooped in and retrieved the offending press release before I was forced to discover exactly how committed I am to the job.
Fashion week is demanding enough for the unencumbered. It’s a beast that waits for no one, least of all the heavily pregnant. So, deep into third trimesterdom, you just find ways to keep up: jamming snacks into tiny handbags, trying to waddle elegantly, and accepting that anything dropped below knee-level no longer belongs to you. You still turn up to the party that starts at 10pm on a Tuesday. You still network, despite it being an activity indisputably served best with Champagne. And at collection re-sees with designers, you still dutifully assess the sample-sized designs, even though the waistbands now seem as tiny as bracelets.
While they felt crisis-level at the time, my own negotiations between pregnancy and fashion week were relatively trivial. Tiring at worst. More so, they sparked my curiousity about the women making motherhood and this famously relentless industry coexist.