Mommy hottest (MILF Article)

http://www.usatoday.com/life/lifestyle/2005-01-26-hotmoms_x.htm


Sporting a playful look: Katie Rowand of Ashburn, Va., with Kylie, five months, says she loves heels — but "not above 3 inches."

But as she fixed breakfast one morning at home in suburban Long Beach, N.Y., her daughter, Victoria, noticed something amiss. Hair, makeup and form-fitting outfit intact and impeccable, Slatest nonetheless stood at the stove in ... fuzzy slippers.

"Mom, you look like a housewife!" Slatest recalls her 7-year-old exclaiming.

"I was like, 'Oh, my God, we can't have this,' " Slatest says.

So she finished making eggs in heels.

Mom has come a long way, baby. Of course, she's far beyond the ironed and buttoned-up June Cleaver archetype. But increasingly she's also moving past the soccer-mom look of the '80s and '90s. She pays attention to trends, assiduously avoiding anything pleated, tapered or high-waisted (the blueprint for the mom jeans memorably lampooned in a Saturday Night Live sketch). She indulges in a nip here, a tuck there. She stays fit, even buff.

Mom, it seems, doesn't want to check her sexuality at the picket-fence gate anymore.

" 'Yummy mummies' we call them in Australia," says Anna Johnson, the author of Three Black Skirts: All You Need to Survive. "They have kitten heels, cleavage, and they don't cut their hair short." Johnson, 38 and pregnant for the first time, hopes to follow the Prada-lined path blazed by sultry moms such as Uma Thurman. "You're handing your body and your life over to your baby, but you don't have to hand your style over to your baby."

Minivan-spurning matriarchs abound in recent pop culture. Stifler's mom (Jennifer Coolidge) proved quite the seductress in the American Pie movies. Stacy's mom (model Rachel Hunter) had it going on, complete with red bikini, in 2003's Fountains of Wayne video. The character of Regina George's mom in last year's Mean Girls (SNL's Amy Poehler) flaunted her breast implants from beneath her figure-hugging track suit.

But perhaps the epitome of the mildly naughty nurturer is Desperate Housewives' Susan Mayer (Teri Hatcher), who readily puts her svelte self on display. Indeed, Hatcher, 40, a single mom herself, coyly poses for the February covers of Harper's Bazaar (in a dress that dips below the waist) and laddie magazine FHM (in plunging lingerie). She even made Mr. Blackwell's best-dressed list for 2004.

Credit Desperate Housewives for fixing the spotlight on come-hither clothing for the post-lactating set. The look came into stark and sparkly view on last week's Golden Globes stage, when Hatcher and her largely fortysomething co-stars, including fellow mom Felicity Huffman in a cleavage-hoisting sheath, outshone some of their younger Hollywood colleagues.

"If we are inspiring women to push the edge of the envelope a little bit ... how fabulous is that?" says the show's costume designer, Cate Adair, herself a mom.

But the show also is reflecting recent cultural changes. "We were in a different place five years ago," Adair says. "Some of the rules have started to get broken." So as low-rise jeans have become the norm, as people have stopped blinking at the sight of a bare belly, the image of a mom in a miniskirt and lip gloss simply seems less scandalous.

Not your disheveled mom

Historically, though, motherhood has been about "not looking like you're on the market," Johnson says. The net effect was to go from being "a Camaro to a Volvo." Consider Erin Brockovich. "One of the reasons everybody found her so shocking was that she was a mom wearing a push-up bra and a baby on her hip, which seemed like an inappropriate accessory," Johnson says. The message? "Women can have it all, but they can't dress like they have it all."

So standard mom clothes serve as a kind of asexual armor. The mothers on thirtysomething: "Do you remember what any of them wore?" And on Sex and the City, the show's only mother, Miranda, was its worst dresser, Johnson argues. "You just imagine losing her at a shop like Bed Bath & Beyond and not being able to find her."

Of course, mom-as-siren and mom-as-schlump occupy two extremes of the style spectrum; the majority of moms breeze from the shopping center to the schoolyard looking perfectly respectable.

Now, though, "mom style" is no oxymoron in part because it's so much easier to achieve, for both women in the workplace and those who stay home. For moms accustomed to spending money mostly on their kids, fashion has become affordable and accessible as mass-market retailers such as Target offer a little edge. And for those who need outside help, there's the forthcoming book Frumpy to Foxy in 15 Minutes Flat: Style Advice for Every Woman, which devotes a chapter to rescuing mousy moms from their unhip selves.

The shrinking generation gap, including the fact that moms increasingly gravitate toward their daughters' closets and jewelry boxes, is "one of the biggest changes in consumer behavior in the past five years," says Marshal Cohen of the NPD Group, a market research firm. These women "cross over. They're interested in current styles, not styles specific to an age. They don't want to dress in their mothers' housedresses anymore."

It has gotten so that sometimes daughters' tastes are more conservative than mothers', especially considering the relatively matronly styles that have dominated runways of late. For instance, Slatest, a freelance makeup artist, would love to buy her daughter "funky little leopard-print skirts, and she's like, 'That's so not me.' She says, 'Mom, you're funky. I'm not funky.' "

Slatest's is a generation unwilling to give up many of the trappings of youth, not just chic clothes. They want to listen to rock 'n' roll into retirement and splurge on the latest electronic gadgets. Abercrombie & Fitch might be marketed to teens and college kids, but Cohen points out that 45- to 50-year-olds are scooping up the trendy togs, too. Likewise, the Honda Element was designed for 25-year-olds, but 45-year-olds are buying the boxy cruiser "even more so."

"Clothing and style does not discriminate according to age like it used to," Cohen says.

Sculpting the mom

Take Michelle Card, who strode through Tampa International Airport recently wearing a deep tan and an even deeper V-neck shirt. With her long blond layers, French pedicure and low-slung jeans, Card, 33, "looks more like a teenager," concludes one of her two sons, Matthew, 10.

A lot of her friends seem similarly more suited to sit in a high school class, not teach one. "They don't want to look older just because they're moms," says Card, an executive at a non-profit organization in Hernando Beach, Fla. "They don't want to let it go." Among the tools of this single mom's maintenance routine? Microdermabrasion, facials and trips to the gym.

In the past, the extra 15 pounds that pregnancy padded on just "wouldn't budge," says Sue Fleming, a personal trainer and author of the new Buff Moms: The Complete Guide to Fitness for All Mothers. (The cover features a woman with a baby in one hand, a dumbbell in the other.) Fleming helps her mom clients drop the weight in as little as six months. "They look great," Fleming says. "They don't have to have that 'I've had babies now I've lost my body' mentality."

Some moms take a more permanent approach to body sculpting. In the past year, Laurie Casas, a plastic surgeon in suburban Glenview, Ill., performed around 70% of her surgical operations (a quarter of which were breast augmentations) on mothers with children under the age of 18; 90% of her non-surgical procedures, including Botox injections, fillers and skin peels, were done on that same group. Though Casas has had maternal patients for 15 years, what has changed in the past five is that moms no longer wince at the thought of spending thousands on themselves.

"I haven't seen the guilt. I see the 'I deserve this,' " says Casas, who also is the national spokeswoman for the American Society for Aesthetic Plastic Surgery. "It's not an entitlement but almost a feeling of 'I'm worth it, I'm important enough.' "

Looking their best

"There's a lot of competitive mommyhood right now," says Jane Buckingham, author of The Modern Girl's Guide to Life. "We're all trying to look the best we can, even if we have spit-up on our shoulder." Buckingham, 36, a mother of two who splits her time between Beverly Hills and Manhattan, concedes that on days when her cute clothes linger in the laundry and her not-yet-showered hair is in a ponytail, she's "too embarrassed" to walk inside her son's preschool to drop him off. So she lets him out in the alley.

Linda Elton, 44, started working out with Fleming last August, nearly three months after giving birth to twin girls. "I don't think you have to stop living just because you become a mother," says Elton, a marketing consultant who lives in Babylon, N.Y. She still gets her hair cut and colored every four weeks. And she still plans to buy a motorcycle someday.

Meanwhile, she's tooling her twins around in a "beautiful" champagne Lincoln Navigator, even though her own mom was nudging her toward the more vanilla Honda Odyssey. Elton's reaction? "You're talking to somebody who had three Corvettes and then an Audi, and now you want to put me in a minivan?"

"I just felt, 'I'm too cool for a van,' " she says.

Ask Katie Rowand of Ashburn, Va., to envision a mom, and she sees a woman who's polished but prim, sporting "a khaki, button-down jacket and a bob haircut. Maybe some bangs, maybe a headband." And maybe behind the wheel of a Volvo station wagon. Rowand's typical outfit, on the other hand, is a pair of Seven jeans and a snug top, anchored by pointy flats or heels. Her car is a Land Rover. And Rowand, who's about to turn 28, has a 5-month-old daughter.

"I'm still young enough that I shouldn't be in a bar with a turtleneck on, you know?"

Sometimes, though, situations do call for comfort over, say, cleavage. During last weekend's nor'easter, Slatest hunkered down, in her sweats and bare face. As she cooked dinner, her husband, Steve, wrapped his arms around her and cooed, "Hello, sexy."

"I laughed and said, 'You've got to be kidding' " — or else really hungry. "He said no, I'm sexy all the time.

 

Hey rrj, if you want, I can add some MILF pics to the thread...