What to Wear to Nigerian Events While Pregnant

You have a wedding to attend between now and the due date, but nothing in the wardrobe fits you?

Most women do not buy a maternity wardrobe, and they are right not to. You wear it for a few months and then it goes. The better approach is choosing ordinary dresses that happen to work.

Look for where the dress sits

The thing that matters most is where the narrowest part of the dress falls. Anything fitted at the natural waist stops working early, usually sooner than you expect.

What keeps working is anything that sits high, under the bust, and then falls away. An empire line does this by design, and so does a lot of ordinary flowing dresses that were never sold as maternity anything.

Wrap styles work for a long time too, because you control where they close.

Fabric with some give

Jersey, anything with a bit of stretch, soft knits. These adjust with you over weeks rather than fitting on one Saturday and not the next.

Stiff structured fabric does the opposite. It fits exactly until suddenly it does not, which usually happens the morning of the event.

Buy a size up rather than maternity

For most Nigerian occasions, going up one or two sizes in a style that was already loose through the middle gives you a dress you can keep wearing afterwards.

A tailor can take it back in later if you want. A maternity dress cannot become anything else.

The heat is worse now

Pregnancy raises your temperature and Lagos was already doing its part, so fabric matters more than it ever has.

Light cotton, breathable weaves, nothing heavily lined. A long event in a lined polyester dress is difficult at the best of times and considerably worse now.

Shoes before anything else

Your feet will swell, particularly later on and particularly in the heat, and they will swell more over the course of a long event.

Block heels, low heels or a good flat. Nothing you have to balance in, because your balance changes as well. This is the one place to let go of what you would normally wear.

You can still dress up properly

There is a tendency to give up and wear something shapeless for six months, and there is no need.

Deeper colours, good fabric, detail at the neckline or the sleeve where people are looking anyway. A dress that skims rather than clings reads as elegant rather than as a compromise, and it photographs better too.

A gele and good earrings do as much work as they always did, and neither of them has stopped fitting.

Shop AMARAÉ for dresses that keep working as things change. Delivery across Nigeria and worldwide.