I also waited as long as possible to buy maternity clothes because figuring out how to dress a pregnant body for the first time, let alone finding great-fitting expandable jeans, is an ordeal. Partly because maternity fashion seems to be an afterthought of the clothing industry, which expects women to abandon their sense of style, and therefore sense of self, during the pregnancy and post-pregnancy months when their normal clothes aren’t an option. When you consider that women have been giving birth for millions of years, it’s utterly perplexing that the best innovation in maternity apparel seems to be attaching pieces of Spanx to pants as the de facto solve for preventing them from ending up around your ankles. As someone who has spent more than a decade working in fashion media (and knew full well that maternity clothes wouldn’t exactly offer Gucci runway-level realness), I was still surprised at my inability to find pants that didn't make me feel like a jeggings-swaddled potato.