In the months leading up to my maternity leave I had been trying to piece together a more formal style than I had attempted before – things that required ironing, things that cost more than I could justify spending. I was starting to feel a need to look like an Instagram feed of Row-era Olsen Twins, or Phoebe Philo’s Celine. I urgently wanted things that a woman with a taste for structured neutrals would wear with nonchalance because she had her shit together. That year I had received a promotion that I’d long fought for, and felt both guilt about leaving work to have a baby, and fear that I would risk losing what I’d gained, that I would set myself back and things would come undone. Dressing with expensive formality might let me leave an image of myself behind, when I finally exited the building, of someone who still belonged there. And in the meantime, it would perhaps, on a surface level at least, help me to feel a little less fractured – present a unified façade – as I moved towards a new understanding of myself. This felt increasingly important as my pregnancy advanced. My body was evolving week by week, unfolding with its own rhythm that was grossly foreign. I had no continuity, I felt like a physical incarnation of time unfurling. In the office I was a countdown to when I would disappear from work and become someone else. I wanted to wear labels that suggested quiet power, a measure of success. I wanted sharp, clean lines to enclose the growing bulge of my stomach that gave away another persona I was moving towards, an impossible to conceal identity announcement.

It felt as if I was at all times inadvertently showing something too intimate and too beyond my control for the work setting. I became conscious of the way in which pregnant stomachs are walking reminders of birth. Those with experience would often, on seeing my stomach, gleefully tell me their personal horror story. However, you don’t need to have much first-hand experience of it (beyond your own entry to the world) for birth to conjure visceral imagery – heaving nakedness, secretion and pain, a nebulous disturbance. It felt like my new subtext, and gave me the sense of an erosion between my private self and the professional. I couldn’t escape the feeling of being exposed in the midst of a monumental change that I didn’t yet even have a grasp of myself. I wanted the order and construction of fashion to smooth over the primalness of pregnancy, to camouflage or distract.

To be pregnant, and then to be a mother, is to be reliant on others – to greater and lesser degrees dependent, like almost everything, on access to money, although family and community can play a vital role of support here too. I was reliant on the information and care of each different midwife I saw throughout my pregnancy. Then I was reliant on doctors, nurses, more midwives and the neonatal care team to keep me and my baby alive. I was reliant on my employer and the government to provide maternity leave, I was reliant on my boyfriend to provide income when I couldn’t, though many mothers, my own included, are reliant on government support instead. The extreme individualism of late capitalism both ensures this dependency, and does not make space for it having any value, any sense of positivity. It is simply a drain on resources. As I lost my privacy and sense of self-governance, I was no longer able to feel like an autonomous woman, and I craved the aesthetics of a woman who did.

I didn’t want to buy maternity wear, both because it felt like a waste of money and because it heightened the otherness of impending motherhood, but at a certain point practicality demanded I get a few pieces. I found the infantile aspect to dressing in later pregnancy was particularly off-putting – trousers and shorts with stretchy elastic bands around the waist, and needing rather than choosing shoes that are easy to slip on when bending becomes a logistical issue. It seemed to me a tactile example of the way that childishness seems to cling to the mother herself, an association of helplessness and naivete transferred to her due to her proximity to it. Aesthetically, there seemed to be either a soft, cutesy femininity in muted tones and flowing shapes, or the ‘boom-here-it-is’ of body-hugging, slightly sexy designs. Some kind of body armour felt more appropriate to me, because to be pregnant is to inhabit a suddenly more vulnerable body. This is not the way pregnancy is presented, but it was, for me, the underlying state of the experience and left me constantly uneasy. I lived it with a heightened awareness of proximity to loss – anyone who has experienced a miscarriage knows the fragility of expectation. Pregnant bodies are more susceptible to illness, with a weakened immune system and regular medications now off limits. And I found that once mundane choices became loaded – food was able to cause harm, the air I exposed myself – taking the tube to work for example – had additional possibilities for damage. Pregnant bodies are waiting for birth, which puts the body at great risk, there are any number of ways it can go wrong for mother and child. But not all pregnant bodies are equally vulnerable, and being white middle-class affords me greater safety and security than pregnant women of colour, particularly black women.

Vulnerability can be cushioned by resources and access, and motherhood and money are bound up together in the way all life milestones are today, but perhaps in a more discernible way than others. The lead up to having a child is tied to finances, many who plan to become parents feel a pressure to reach a certain level of success before they can have kids. And motherhood is a highly marketable category, there are an endless array of things you might be persuaded to buy in order to do it ‘correctly,’ safely, providing for a child in the best way possible. This creates a visible gap between those who can have all of this, and those who can’t. My own preoccupation with the money element of motherhood is driven at least in part by an awareness of its lack in early childhood, being born to a young single mother. Though ostensibly the only real damage I suffered – I was never without any necessity – is the preoccupation itself. It’s not unconnected that during pregnancy I wanted to dress in expensive labels.

Dressing the part of a Professional Woman commensurate with this particular life stage was, I think, an attempt to minimise the vulnerability I felt to a change in perception in how I was viewed. It felt clear to me that opting to downplay my role of mother, and instead, tooling up my work persona would help me to control the way I was seen. I would present my work self as my essential self, and regulate the rest to the background in the way that parenthood naturally exists for men – it sits in a place that will never impinge on the rest of him. On the work stage, pulling off the performance that your essential self is the one you present there is for most women an economic necessity. Social media, though, has made room for an alternative outlet for motherhood in which some are able to parlay it into their branded self, making it an asset. This can work for a certain subset of women in the fashion and lifestyle industry – high profile, quite a bit of money, looks good on Instagram – who present it as a seamless addition to their working life, but the working life is always tweaked, changed in a way to reflect this development. In fashion and related media she needs to have reached a high level of professional success, she needs access to a sense of exclusivity, to trigger aspiration in order to make motherhood an asset. She becomes a shiny showcase of the Working Mother, and trades in wider cultural relevance for the siloed experience of public motherhood. She also gives up more privacy.

When the collision of motherhood and work happened for me, my total lack of control was played out dramatically, my body would not follow the basic prescribed timeline. Five weeks before my due date, on a train into work I noticed liquid running down my legs. At first just a trickle, but by the time I got off the train at Liverpool Street Station, among the morning rush, my socks were soaked, my shoes full of amniotic fluid. I took another train into the hospital, changed into a hospital gown and in between scans and tests I emailed my boss to say I wouldn’t be coming into work. It’s been nearly one year since that day, and in that time I’ve been navigating motherhood as privately as possible, which has been very possible since the pandemic has shut much of ordinary life down. My need for seclusion has been both a reaction to the exposure I felt during pregnancy, and driven by an attempt to form an understanding of this new dimension of myself, what I’ve lost and what I’ve gained and what has remained. I’ve worn the same things again and again – old, baggy comfortable T-shirts and sweatshirts and worn-in jeans, and I’ve not bought anything new for myself. This has served purposes – comfort, ease, not needing any thought or planning, shaping myself outwardly as little as possible, an escape from consumption, and perhaps a return to some kind of softness. I don’t know what I’ll wear when I return to work soon, or what I’ll feel the need to project. My body is becoming my own again but motherhood still feels to me like treading at the border of chaos, though now with a heavy responsibility to someone else to stop things from unravelling. I’m not sure how I will move between motherhood and work and how the rest of me fits into these spaces, but I feel open to being in flux as it seems the only way to maintain myself. Motherhood has adjusted my sense of time, everything feels more immediate, more fragmented. As Rachel Cusk wrote, referring to Coleridge’s poem ‘Frost at Midnight’ and its depiction of parenthood, ‘Perhaps moments, now, are all there is.’ I don’t have my shit together, but I’ve known that total loss of control and come through the other side.

Clementine de Pressigny is the editorial director of i-D magazine, currently on maternity leave.

TWELVE O’CLOCK. DÉJUNER chez Jeanne Veron, Place Vendôme.

Anna, dressed in the black cotton, chemise-like garment of the mannequin off duty was trying to find her way along dark passages and down complicated flights of stairs to the underground from where lunch was served.

She was shivering, for she had forgotten her coat, and the garment that she wore was very short, sleeveless, displaying her rose-coloured stockings to the knee. Her hair was flamingly and honestly red; her eyes, which were very gentle in expression, brown and heavily shadowed with kohl, her face small and pale under its professional rouge. She was fragile, like a delicate child, her arms pathetically thin. It was to her legs that she owed this dazzling, this incredible opportunity.

Madame Veron, white-haired with black eyes, incredibly distinguished, who had given them one sweeping glance, the glance of the connoisseur, smiled imperiously and engaged her at an exceedingly small salary. As a beginner, Madame explained, Anna could not expect more. She was to wear the jeune fille dresses. Another smile, another sharp glance.

Anna was conducted from the Presence by an underling who helped her to take off the frock she had worn temporarily for the interview. Aspirants for an engagement are always dressed in a model of the house.

She had spent yesterday afternoon in a delirium tempered by a feeling of exaggerated reality, and in buying the necessary make-up. It had been such a forlorn hope, answering the advertisement.

The morning had been dreamlike. At the back of the wonderful decorated salons she had found an unexpected sombreness; the place, empty, would have been dingy and melancholy, countless puzzling corridors and staircases, a rabbit warren and a labyrinth. She despaired of ever finding her way.

In the mannequins’ dressing-room she spent a shy hour making up her face – in an extraordinary and distinctive atmosphere of slimness and beauty; white arms and faces vivid with rouge; raucous voices and the smell of cosmetics; silken lingerie. Coldly critical glances were bestowed upon Anna’s reflection in the glass. None of them looked at her directly… A depressing room, taken by itself, bare and cold, a very inadequate conservatory for these human flowers. Saleswomen in black rushed in and out, talking in sharp voices; a very old woman hovered, helpful and shapeless, showing Anna where to hang her clothes, presenting to her the black garment that Anna was wearing, going to lunch. She smiled with professional motherliness, her little, sharp, black eyes travelling rapidly from la nouvelle’s hair to her ankles and back again.

She was Madame Pecard, the dresser.

Before Anna had spoken a word she was called away by a small boy in buttons to her destination in one of the salons: there, under the eye of a vendeuse, she had to learn the way to wear the innocent and springlike air and garb of the jeune fille. Behind a yellow, silken screen she was hustled into a leather coat and paraded under the cold eyes of an American buyer. This was the week when the spring models are shown to important people from big shops all over Europe and America: the most critical week of the season… The American buyer said that he would have that, but with an inch on to the collar and larger cuffs. In vain the saleswoman, in her best English with its odd Chicago accent, protested that that would completely ruin the chic of the model. The American buyer knew what he wanted and saw that he got it.

The vendeuse sighed, but there was a note of admiration in her voice. She respected Americans: they were not like the English, who, under a surface of annoying moroseness of manner, were notoriously timid and easy to turn round your finger.

‘Was that all right?’ Behind the screen one of the saleswomen smiled encouragingly and nodded. The other shrugged her shoulders. She had small, close-set eyes, a long thin nose and tight lips of the regulation puce colour. Behind her silken screen Anna sat on a high white stool. She felt that she appeared charming and troubled. The white and gold of the salon suited her red hair.

A short morning. For the mannequin’s day begins at ten and the process of making up lasts an hour. The friendly saleswoman volunteered the information that her name was Jeannine, that she was in the lingerie, that she considered Anna rudement jolie, that noon was Anna’s lunch hour. She must go down the corridor and up those stairs, through the big salon then… Anyone would tell her. But Anna, lost in the labyrinth, was too shy to ask her way. Besides, she was not sorry to have time to brace herself for the ordeal. She had reached the regions of utility and oilcloth: the decorative salons were far overhead. Then the smell of food – almost visible, it was so cloud-like and heavy – came to her nostrils, and high-noted, and sibilant, a buzz of conversation made her draw a deep breath. She pushed a door open.

She was in a big, very low-ceilinged room, all the floor space occupied by long wooden tables with no cloths… She was sitting at the mannequins’ table, gazing at a thick and hideous white china plate, a twisted tin fork, a wooden-handled stained knife, a tumbler so thick it seemed unbreakable.

There were twelve mannequins at Jeanne Veron’s: six of them were lunching, the others still paraded, goddess-like, till their turn came for rest and refreshment. Each of the twelve was a distinct and separate type: each of the twelve knew her type and kept to it, practising rigidly in clothing, manner, voice and conversation.

Round the austere table were now seated Babette, the gamine, the traditional blonde enfant; Mona, tall and darkly beautiful, the femme fatale, the wearer of sumptuous evening gowns. Georgette was the garçonne; Simone with green eyes Anna knew instantly for a cat whom men would and did adore, a sleek, white, purring, long-lashed creature… Eliane was the star of the collection.

Eliane was frankly ugly and it did not matter: no doubt Lilith, from whom she was obviously descended, had been ugly too. Her hair was henna-tinted, her eyes small and black, her complexion bad under her thick make-up. Her hips were extraordinarily slim, her hands and feet exquisite, every movement she made was as graceful as a flower’s in the wind. Her walk… But it was her walk which made her the star there and earned her a salary quite fabulous for Madame Veron’s, where large salaries were not the rule… Her walk and her ‘chic of the devil’ which lit an expression of admiration in even the cold eyes of American buyers.

Eliane was a quiet girl, pleasant-mannered. She wore a ring with a beautiful emerald on one long, slim finger, and in her small eyes were both intelligence and mystery.

Madame Pecard, the dresser, was seated at the head of the mannequins’ table, talking loudly, unlistened to, and gazing benevolently at her flock.

At other tables sat the sewing girls, pale-faced, black-frocked – the workers heroically gay, but with the stamp of labour on them: and the saleswomen. The mannequins, with their sensual, blatant charms and their painted faces were watched covertly, envied and apart.

Babette the blond enfant was next to Anna, and having started the conversation with a few good, round oaths at the quality of the sardines, announced proudly that she could speak English and knew London very well. She began to tell Anna the history of her adventures in the city of coldness, dark and fogs… She had gone to a job as a mannequin in Bond Street and the villainous proprietor of the shop having tried to make love to her and she being rigidly virtuous, she had left. And another job, Anna must figure to herself, had been impossible to get, for she, Babette, was too small and slim for the Anglo-Saxon idea of a mannequin.

She stopped to shout in a loud voice to the woman who was serving: ‘Hé, my old one, don’t forget your little Babette…’

Opposite, Simone the cat and the sportive Georgette were having a low-voiced conversation about the tristeness of a monsieur of their acquaintance. ‘I said to him,’ Georgette finished decisively, ‘Nothing to be done, my rabbit. You have not looked at me well, little one. In my place would you not have done the same?’

She broke off when she realized that the others were listening, and smiled in a friendly way at Anna.

She too, it appeared, had ambitions to go to London because the salaries were so much better there. Was it difficult? Did they really like French girls? Parisiennes?

The conversation became general.

‘The English boys are nice,’ said Babette, winking one divinely candid eye. ‘I had a chic type who used to take me to dinner at the Empire Palace. Oh, a pretty boy . . .’

‘It is the most chic restaurant in London,’ she added importantly.

The meal reached the stage of dessert. The other tables were gradually emptying; the mannequins all ordered very strong coffee, several liqueur. Only Mona and Eliane remained silent; Eliane, because she was thinking of something else; Mona, because it was her type, her genre to be haughty.

Her hair swept away from her white, narrow forehead and her small ears: her long earrings nearly touching her shoulders, she sipped her coffee with a disdainful air. Only once, when the blonde enfant, having engaged in a passage of arms with the waitress and got the worst of it, was momentarily discomfited and silent, Mona narrowed her eyes and smiled an astonishingly cruel smile.

As soon as her coffee was drunk she got up and went out.

Anna produced a cigarette, and Georgette, perceiving instantly that here was the sportive touch, her genre, asked for one and lit it with a devil-may-care air. Anna eagerly passed her cigarettes round, but the Mère Pecard interfered weightily. It was against the rules of the house for the mannequins to smoke, she wheezed. The girls all lit their cigarettes and smoked. The Mère Pecard rumbled on: ‘A caprice, my children. All the world knows that mannequins are capricious. Is it not so?’ She appealed to the rest of the room.

As they went out Babette put her arm round Anna’s waist and whispered: ‘Don’t answer Madame Pecard. We don’t like her. We never talk to her. She spies on us. She is a camel.’

That afternoon Anna stood for an hour to have a dress draped on her. She showed this dress to a stout Dutch lady buying for the Hague, to a beautiful South American with pearls, to a silver-haired American gentleman who wanted an evening cape for his daughter of seventeen, and to a hook-nosed, odd English lady of title who had a loud voice and dressed, under her furs, in a grey jersey and stout boots.

The American gentleman approved of Anna, and said so, and Anna gave him a passionately grateful glance. For, if the vendeuse Jeannine had been uniformly kind and encouraging, the other, Madame Tienne, had been as uniformly disapproving and had once even pinched her arm hard.

About five o’clock Anna became exhausted. The four white and gold walls seemed to close in on her. She sat on her high white stool staring at a marvellous nightgown and fighting an intense desire to rush away. Anywhere! Just to dress and rush away anywhere, from the raking eyes of the customers and the pinching fingers of Irene.

‘I will one day. I can’t stick it,’ she said to herself. ‘I won’t be able to stick it.’ She had an absurd wish to gasp for air.

Jeannine came and found her like that.

‘It is hard at first, hein?… One asks oneself: Why? For what good? It is all idiot. We are all so. But we go on. Do not worry about Irene.’ She whispered: ‘Madame Vernon likes you very much. I heard her say so.’

At six o’clock Anna was out in the rue de la Paix; her fatigue forgotten, the feeling that now she really belonged to the great, maddening city possessed her and she was happy in her beautifully cut tailor-made and beret.

Georgette passed her and smiled; Babette was in a fur coat.

All up the street the mannequins were coming out of the shops, pausing on the pavements a moment, making them as gay and as beautiful as beds of flowers before they walked swiftly away and the Paris night swallowed them up.

Jean Rhys was a Caribbean-born British novelist and short-story writer. Before writing The Left Bank, her 1927 debut story collection in which “Mannequin” originally appeared, Rhys worked as a model, canteen worker and chorus girl, experiences which shaped her often-autobiographical fiction.