Company files for bankruptcy in 3… 2… 1…
Via Slate:
… But perhaps the most visible way in which motherhood is changing is apparent in maternity clothes. This past year, an independent retailer that offers alternatives to the pregnant little girl packaging of motherhood has cropped up and received heavy media coverage—Butchbaby & Co, the brain child of CEO Vanessa Newman and chief design officer Michelle Janayea, two friends who met in college, dreamed of being pregnant at the same time, but couldn’t imagine wearing all those bows. So they decided to design and create an alternative: Their line will offer maternity hoodies and button-down shirts, as well as masculine-styled T-shirts, jeans, pants, sports bras, and briefs. They bill themselves as “the first ever alternity wear for pregnant masculine, transgender, and queer individuals—don’t change just because your body does.”
“As much as the LGBTQ community is becoming embraced, motherhood is still very heteronormatively presented in the mainstream world,” says Newman, who presents masculine of center and embraces the term butch. “We’re really highlighting that motherhood doesn’t look one way. I definitely want to be a mom one day, I definitely want to carry my own child.”
“We live in a society where clothing is integral to how we present and are seen. It’s definitely about more than clothes, it’s my community,” Newman says. “I kept hearing stories from people who said they need this.”
One such story comes from Debra Guy, head of the Charlottesville, Virginia, chapter of Butch Voices—a grassroots organization that provides support and visibility to masculine of center people. Guy doesn’t like showing as much skin as all the scoop neck mainstream maternity wear reveals, so when she became pregnant, she turned to buying white ribbed men’s undershirts and wearing them underneath her maternity wear. “Neutral colors; stop it with the three-quarter-length sleeves; stop it with the big scoop necks. Just cover me,” Guy told me over coffee. “My last month being pregnant, I just wore T-shirts to work. I found T-shirts that didn’t look terrible, and I wore those. And I wore sandals, because my feet were super swollen. Weird baggy cargo maternity pants. It’s not my finest moment in fashion.”