French Vogue: Bringing Up Baby On Cigarettes And Prada

Oh, mon dieu. French Vogue has outdone themselves. The April issue features a faux pregnant Lilly Donaldson wearing six-inch heels and doing things with a doll and a baby bottle that, well, defy summary. You really have to check these photos out yourself.

Call me paranoid, but I think they may be making fun of les americains
in this one. All right, you got us, we Americans ARE totally uptight about not letting
our foetuses smoke in utero.

In the next one, it seems the model confused the instruction, “Check the temperature of the milk on your wrist,” with, “Use the milk to shoot up.”

Judging from Jezebel’s take on the spread, I’m more uptight than I thought. Both the writers and commenters seemed united in their appreciation of the, ah, unusual take on motherhood. Tatiana writes, “French Vogue found the tenderness in mothering, but also the humour, the wackiness, the suggestion that it isn’t perhaps natural to all women, and the surprise.”

As in, “Surprise! Motherhood turned me into a heroin addict?” I guess I don’t like to be quite that surprised.

I agree with Jezebel that it’s nice to see taboos busted, but this spread perpetrates just as many myths about femininity as it knocks down. Donaldson couldn’t look more childish and helpless in many of these photos.

I like the idea that motherhood does not equal self-sacrificing sainthood, but is a pregnant supermodel smoking two cigarettes at the same time necessarily the best way to demonstrate that?

Photos: Jezebel