Pregnancy on the Runway in London

Fashion is an establishment that vacillates so frequently and broadly that its diversity bleeds out of the actual clothes (now exhausted by the miraculously simultaneous deaths and births of every decade that has influenced it) into its supporting corridors.

Take, for example, its models. For a period, they were obtusely underage. When that blew up in the kind of pedophiliac flames that are wont to espouse frustration on the Internet, 18-to-early-twenties became the, for lack of a better word, norm.

When that got too normal, dames well into their golden years — think Joni Mitchell for Saint Laurent, Joan Didion for Céline, Linda Rodin for the Row, and the entire cast of Ari Cohen’s Advanced Style for Karen Walker — became a point of celebration.

And when it wasn’t about the models? It was about the spectators who watched them from the front row. Toddlers sat aboard their editor parents’ laps during September’s New York Fashion Week. Kim Kardashian saw to it that this trend proliferated with the appearance of North West this past season, too.

Even different genera of mammals have had their fashion “moment”; Grace Coddington did, after all, put the cat on the map that is style and its overtures. Dogs have taken the catwalk too in the past two years, and as recently as last Tuesday, there was a King Charles Cavalier being street style-photographed as though he were Miroslava Duma.

So what’s next? According to London Fashion Week, pregnancy is at the helm of a new frontier. Alice Temperley sent two models, both distinctly pregnant, down her runway on Sunday in a show that beautifully honored the female form in its different permutations and challenged the definition of formal wear with knit details and thick coats and some scarves.

Both fetus-carriers, one in several layers of black and the other in a sequined evening dress worn with black flat suede combat boots, looked spectacularly fresh and more impressive than, say, I do, zero months pregnant. This might beg the question of what happens next for those of us 5-foot-what? mortals. Will we begin to scrutinize even our co-opted-by-a-second-life-bodies — the holy grail of time that no woman has heretofore blamed herself for body-image shortcomings?

Or will we stop using “I feel pregnant in this” to self-deprecate in the name of embracing our baby — or otherwise — bumps?