Bridging the Motherhood Divide Pt. 2: Mom Fashion & The Nap Dress

Happy Friday! Last week we dug into the divide that seems to spring up between women with and without kids, especially in our own millennial milieu. We loved opening up to each other and all of you about the resentments and pressures and societal structures that conspire to sort moms from non-moms, and how we try to foster friendship and community across those lines in our own lives.

We got so many wonderful messages about this episode, and we want to build off of it and address many of the important topics you brought up — women who have always known they want to be childfree, women who are unpartnered, women who are also taking care of elderly parents, and so much more — in future episodes. (Some will be public, and some will be subscriber-only.)

But we have a much more frivolous topic today, because this was actually going to be the second half of last week’s episode, and we didn’t want our notes to languish forever. So our topic today: the nap dress and cottagecore for moms and non-moms!

We both read Anne Helen Petersen’s Culture Study essay “Unpacking the Nap Dress,” which traces the historical precedents for romanticized, pastoral styles like the current crop of gauzy, ruffly nap dresses and the corresponding trend of mommy-and-me dressing, and draws out the ways in which these styles have been harbingers of backlash against change and attempts to reassert conservative values around women’s roles and the domestic sphere. She zeroes in on the ways that these dresses appeal to millennial moms, in particular, and work to signal class, politics, and race.

As big fans of the nap dress, we were intrigued, and it inspired a long and enthusiastic chat about dressing our changing bodies, reimagining a world without the capitalist rat race, and finding common ground through fashion. Hope you enjoy!

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