An interesting fashion exhibition titled M&Others, dedicated to the complex theme of fashion and motherhood, is open from June 14, 2024, to January 6, 2025, at the Fashion Museum in the Belgian city of Hasselt (Modemuseum Hasselt), which is just about an hour’s drive or train ride from Brussels. The occasion for the exhibition was the grand Marian celebration in honor of Hasselt’s patron saint, the Virgin Mary – the Jesse Tree (Virga Jesse), which was held from August 11 to 25, 2024. This celebration has been taking place in Hasselt every seven years for 340 years, with a painted, wooden Gothic statue of the Virgin Mary from the 14th century, kept in the local basilica, at its center.

The inspiration fashion designers draw from faith, sacred art, and the Virgin Mary as the ideal woman and mother is evidenced by selected runway models displayed at the exhibition. Among them are models from Jean Paul Gaultier’s iconic spring collection for 2007 with striking quotes from Catholic visual art, as well as a model from the popular Dolce & Gabbana Tailored Mosaic collection for 2013, based on motifs from Byzantine-style mosaics in the cathedral of Monreale in Sicily.

The exhibition, curated by Eve Demoen, traces the attitude towards the cultural identity of mothers, which has gained increasing importance in society and fashion since 1900. In addition to dresses and corsets from the 19th century, designed to conceal changes in the body of the expectant mother, the exhibition also features the cover of Vanity Fair magazine from August 1991, with a nude photograph of actress Demi Moore in her seventh month of pregnancy, taken by famous American photographer Annie Leibovitz. Starting from the cult of the Virgin Mary and European bourgeois culture, this dynamic exhibition reaches to contemporary fashion experiments and controversies with various social stereotypes related to the female body.

After giving birth to her daughter Marguerite in 1895 at the age of thirty, fashion designer Jeanne Lanvin began designing children’s clothing. In 1908, she opened a children’s department in her fashion house, and in 1909, a department for mothers and daughters, where mothers could buy complementary clothing for themselves and their little girls. In recent decades, this concept of dressing mothers and daughters has been trending as Mini Me. On the other hand, the symbolic fashion mother Madeleine Vionnet is presented at the exhibition with a branching installation that shows her great influence on both contemporaries and fashion designers of future generations. In addition to creating new canons of female elegance by liberating the female body from corsets, Vionnet, whose fashion house operated intermittently from 1912 to 1940, gave her employees maternity leave and provided daycare for their children.

Many famous fashion designers were influenced by the personality and style of their own mothers. Christian Dior kept a photograph of his mother Madeleine Dior on his desk, wearing a dress with a narrow waist, following the Belle Époque fashion. As a homage to Madeleine, the narrow waist became characteristic of Dior’s New Look, launched in 1947. Dior also found inspiration in memories of colors in the interior of his childhood home in Granville, Normandy, where the Christian Dior Museum (Musée Christian Dior) is now located, as well as in various types of flowers in the home garden that his mother carefully tended. The exhibition also showcases paper dolls for dressing that Yves Saint Laurent made at the age of 17, modeled after the fashionable clothes from his mother’s wardrobe.

In numerous stories about mothers, maternal figures, and fashion, of which only a few are briefly told in this blog, classic Hermès bags Birkin and Kelly have also found their place. On a flight from Paris to London in 1984, actress Jane Birkin complained to Jean-Louis Dumas, president and artistic director of the Hermès fashion house, that she couldn’t find a bag that would meet all her needs as a mother. Dumas soon devised a solution in the form of a spacious, functional rectangular bag. This Hermès model, which even contained pockets for baby bottles, is now known as the Birkin. Another luxury Hermès bag, the Kelly, entered fashion history in 1956 when Grace Kelly, Princess of Monaco, tried to use it to conceal her pregnant belly from intrusive paparazzi.