Laura Cumming

Pregnancy style

YOU don't have to be pregnant to notice images of maternity everywhere at this time of year. There is the Virgin in profile on a donkey, her pregnant form discreetly summarised as a triangle of blue cloth. There is the joy, a day or so later, when the newborn baby is safely delivered into her arms. Then there is the particularly touching scene when a crew of awestruck visitors kneel before the holy mother and child, awkward with reverence for the miraculous birth.

This tableau, I like to think, is intended to parallel the reality of secular life. Mary is any mother, Jesus any child, and the assorted shepherds, sages and kings are the visitors to Ward 21 who stand around and gawp. The miraculous birth becomes the miracle of birth, something that can never be diminished by indignity, exhaustion, medical intervention or pain. Stable or airport, epidural or none, this is an irreducibly wondrous event.

Except, that is, to the executives who concocted the advertisement for the latest Harvey Nichols store. These people put their heads together and came up with the concept of a pair of legs in obstetric stirrups, the feet in expensive shoes. This grotesque image was clinched with a caption: ''A new shoe department is born''. The admen were pleased, the store was satisfied and the poster went up on billboards 15ft high. Until last week, that is, when it was removed on the orders of the Advertising Standards Authority which upheld the many complaints against it.

Clearly, the executives were at the very least seasonally maladroit. Shoppers in Leeds, scene of this shoe-shop nativity, were shocked to see these posters in their Christmas streets. Leaving aside the Virgin Mary, they also thought it demeaned women and trivialised childbirth. But were the admen really so out of tune? Was their obscene parody of consumer lust not in some small sense a sign of the times?

A few years ago, pregnancy was fashionable in the glamour industry because it yielded cute little accessories for photoshoots. Supermodels in backless dresses carried infants in their slender arms. Film stars were snapped with borrowed children at parties. Babies snoozed upon the washboard stomachs of strapping men to sell merchandise for Calvin Klein.

Now the pregnancy itself is discovered to be the perfect opportunity for a fashion statement. Scary Spice favours clinging slips of diamante-encrusted scarlet. Posh Spice, approaching the end of her third trimester, favours shrink-wrapped lycra. Melanie Blatt from All Saints goes for the bare midriff look, revealing yet more of her exhaustively-vaunted girl power. They all, to a woman, wear exactly the kind of footwear the Harvey Nichols ad urges you to buy.

If you've got it, flaunt it - that's the high-pitched shriek of these catwalk clothes. As with all the other taxing injunctions of fashion, this one is not easy to follow.

Many women of increased girth, swollen ankles, backache and the other, more subtle, humiliations of pregnancy, would rather wear the Virgin's capacious blue cloak than a cocktail dress with shoestring straps. Even those with elegant legs and lycra bumps sometimes suffer evening as well as morning sickness and would rather stay in with a stockpile of digestives. Some women simply do not want to force themselves, like the Spice Girls, into the kind of clothes they wore before they were pregnant.

For what is being flaunted here is not the pregnancy, so much as the overcoming of that pregnancy. The ideal is to look as though nothing has changed, to carry on with energy undiminished, to behave as though pregnancy is a contour instead of a human condition. You work, you play, you go out and buy that new pair of shoes. When the baby is born, you simply sign on for the Government's tax-credit scheme, which actively rewards you for hiring childcare and returning to business as usual.

The hitch, as ever, is wealth. If a woman is unemployed, she can forget this hyperbolic fantasy straight away, since she is unlikely to be eligible for the tax scheme, never mind the over-priced footwear. If she is poorly paid, this touched-up version of Shirley Conran's Superwoman, relic of the horrible have-it-all seventies, is not an option she can afford.

Many low-paid women have to work right up until labour. Few of them have the money for hairdressers, nutritionists, dressmakers, or personal trainers, like Posh Spice, to keep their image and energy from flagging. Many women have to return to work within days of the birth. Few of them have a supporting retinue of well-paid assistants, nannies and house-husbands, like ScottishPower's superwoman, Sue Clark, who was hard at work doing deals on the video link two days after her daughter's birth.

Why make a heroine out of a woman who obviously prefers the generation of capital to that of children? Why make an icon out of a pop star who endures mindless hours in the gym rather than appear remotely pregnant beyond a modest convexity? Let us wear heels, lycra or an old sack if we want, so long as we don't pretend that nothing much is going on when a small miracle is about to happen.