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Dropping the kids off? Better up your game if you want to keep up with Claudia, Elle, Victoria et al. But how did the busy working mum look become a style statement?
When Allison Pearson wrote her novel I Don't Know How She Does It – subtitled The Life Of Kate Reddy, Working Mother – nine years ago, it was an out-of-the-box publishing hit. For months it seemed you were never more than 10 paces from a copy. The publishers called it "a comedy about failure, a tragedy about success". The trials and absurdities of juggling children and a career were a hot topic, from the review sections of every Sunday broadsheet to the sofas of every daytime chatshow.
Nobody, however, called it a style statement. The paperback cover featured an alarm clock, not a high heel; working motherhood was a watercooler debate, not a look. Fast-forward to the release last night of the film of the book. Kate Reddy is played by Sarah Jessica Parker, who as Carrie Bradshaw in Sex And The City gave us the definitive portrait of the noughties Cocktail Girl ideal. Parker plays Reddy for all the world as if she were a Sliding Doors alternative view of who Carrie might be now. Kate has Carrie's ditzy gestures, her penchant for a very high heel, her uncanny knack for the wistful cab ride that takes you past a glittering Manhattan Christmas tree.
This time around, I Don't Know How She Does It is a fashion event. The trailer starred a Mulberry Alexa handbag, filmed in close-up. August's edition of American Vogue starred Sarah Jessica Parker – coverline, How Does She Do It? Fame, Family And Fashion – with a series of family portraits inside, shot by Mario Testino, portraying working motherhood through a Vogue lens: SJP in a red carpet-ready Bottega Veneta ballgown, scooping up two-year-old Tabitha for a cuddle or striking a pose in a Chanel suit against bunk beds.
What is striking about the Vogue portrayal of How She Does It is the embrace of chaos. The rooms are exaggeratedly messy, Mummy is clearly on her way out somewhere fabulous, and everyone looks blissfully happy with the scenario. It is, of course, a very manicured type of chaos – artfully splayed crayons and a cute tableau of cuddly toys, rather than shreds of Play-Doh accumulating in pools of sticky apple juice in hard-to-reach patches under the kitchen table.
The Yummy Mummy is over. That move-to-the-country-and-bake-cupcakes shtick? Way last year. Bucolic is dead, and busy is back. The Yummy Mummy – the feminine ideal that usurped the Cocktail Girl – was all about a blissed-out Cath Kidston lifestyle of lovingly penned thank you notes and homemade fancy-dress costumes. The I Don't Know How woman is more interested in swapping war stories about burning the birthday cake at midnight than butterfly cupcake recipes.
"Celebrity culture" sometimes feels like a kind of psychiatrist's couch for our collective psyche. The famous-for-being-famous are there for a reason: to help us work through our issues. A couple of years ago, one of the world's glossiest and most photographed mothers, Victoria Beckham, underwent a noticeable change of tack. As her second career as a fashion designer took off, she embraced a different image. Her new incarnation – still at LAX in sunglasses but now in black tailoring, with a steel-framed handbag, rather than in uber-soccer mom denim cut-offs or with the leisured-lady's pile of trunks – was not only more fashionable, it was more businesslike. Having spent most of a decade giving out the message that she was with her family all the time, she began talking about work trips to New York, about juggling careers, about how supportive David is of what she wants to do. Kate Winslet also sends out different messages. Instead of playing down the demands of her job and emphasising how much time she spends at home, she talks up the busy, working lifestyle. "I'm very much inspired by mothers, women who can pull it all together, do it all," she said recently. "Those are the women setting examples to a future generation of young women, and that's what I'm trying to do for my daughter."
Motherhood has infiltrated fashion and glossy magazine culture to a startling extent over the past two decades. In the 50s, the ideal was to dress as the perfect wife; in the 60s, it was to emulate the perfect girlfriend. When Demi Moore posed naked and pregnant on the cover of Vanity Fair in 1991, she was at the vanguard of a new era, in which the glossy magazine ideal of femininity was to become closely linked with motherhood. A fascination with pregnancy dominated – the pop star with bump was the cultural pin-up of the late 90s. Navigating pregnancy and childbirth without getting fat and frumpy was an obsession: an achievement for which the famous were lauded, and which the norms struggled to emulate. The messy hinterland of later motherhood was pretty much ignored.
Fast-forward to 2011 and the focus has shifted. The key moment for a female celebrity to work her look is not at the nascent bump stage, or on the steps of the hospital, but a few years later, on the school run. School Run Chic has become – like Black Tie, or Cocktail, or Beach – a fashion subset in its own right. Photographs of celebrities on the school run easily trump the previous favourite – famous people in their gym gear – in the paparazzi-shot pecking order. The point about the school run is that it is a frantic, chaotic time of the day in pretty much any household with children. To make it a style competition as well gives the alpha mummies the opportunity to demonstrate that they can look hot in any circumstances.
By becoming queens of the school run, Claudia Schiffer and Elle Macpherson have rebooted their supermodel status. Schiffer has been the first to monetise this position, launching a range of cashmere pieces targeted at the school run scenario. Talking fashion editors through the collection this year, the repeat phrase of her spiel was "perfect for the school run". The central promotion for the range has been Schiffer herself wearing them on the school run. With the arrival of its own celebrity-branded range, the school run has marked its arrival as part of an aspirational lifestyle.
It escapes nobody's notice that the Schiffer version of "busy mum chic" is a Disneyfied version of what working motherhood is really like. When Gwyneth Paltrow wrote a Goop newsletter with her tips for surviving life as a busy mum, the blogosphere almost exploded with the frustration of less privileged working mothers irate at being measured against and preached to by women with personal assistants and limitless Addison Lee accounts. (Gwyneth's top multitasking tip was that after her 9am post-school run workout – a schedule that sounds pretty luxurious to working mothers with more prosaic, office-based jobs – she does her stretches while the conditioner is on her hair.)
There are two problems with the notion of working-mum chic. For one, it feeds into a blinkered deification of mothers as heroines that is skewing our culture. Our obsession with motherhood threatens to obscure the fact that communities need sisters, wives, daughters and friends. These roles are important. Second, the American Vogue/Goop version is as unrealistic for most of us as the perma-smiling 50s housewife or the 80s hard-body gym bunny. A catfight between the cashmered, Pilates-honed school-runners and the rest of us is no more constructive than the one that preceded it, between working and stay-at-home mothers.
But still, the working mother's acceptance in the style sphere is something to be championed. Setting ridiculously high style standards is fashion's way of telling you that you are on trend. Figuring out a way to wear the new midi-length skirt to the office, as SJP does, may take precious time you can scarcely afford. But look on the bright side: think of all the time you'll save on baking and tidying the kitchen.
Jess Cartner-Morley
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