Hours before the feathers, glitter and confetti extravaganza that was the Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show on Sunday, the model Barbara Palvin said in an interview with Page Six that she was one day shy of being six weeks postpartum.
“I tell everyone: this is normal, to be back,” she said, while sitting in her makeup chair backstage. “Maternity leave is 6 to 8 weeks, I’m six weeks tomorrow so I’m just doing what everyone’s doing and I only have to walk down a runway.”
After the birth of her daughter, Sylvie, in September, she didn’t have to work too hard for her body to “bounce back,” said Palvin, who officially became an Angel, as the brand’s marquee models are known, in 2019. She added that she ate healthy foods, did some light exercises and let her body heal on its own. She worried only about falling, because “my wings are heavy,” she said.
She’s not the only model to return to work quickly. In 2009, Heidi Klum famously walked the Victoria’s Secret runway just six weeks after giving birth. In 2012, Adriana Lima donned angel wings when she was around eight weeks postpartum. Several other models have taken mere months before they returned to runways, like Emily Ratajkowski, Karlie Kloss and Irina Shayk.
The visuals of Palvin strutting on the runway later that day, first in a sheer, pink-and-white mini dress and then again in a bedazzled silver corset, flowing skirt and wings, are seen, by many, as empowering. On social media, the words “superhuman” and “iconic” were strewn across the comments on posts about her. “Yesssss my girl!” said fellow model and mother, Ashley Graham, in the comments of an Instagram post in the run-up to the show, where Palvin is seen pushing a stroller.
And in interviews on the red carpet outside the show, Palvin’s husband, the actor Dylan Sprouse, acknowledged that what she was doing was ambitious and described the model as simply “built different.”
Within hours, Palvin had put a spotlight on the fact that many working women do return to their jobs in the United States — the only country in the developed world that does not mandate paid maternity leave — mere weeks after giving birth. At the same time, some critics said she was normalizing what they saw as an unrealistic precedent for new mothers.
“Bless her, she’s saying this is not something that is remarkable in any way, because she’s doing what other U.S. mothers do in this country,” said Melissa Goldstein, co-founder and co-editor of Mother Tongue, a biannual print magazine focused on modern motherhood. “But of course, it sort of begs the question of, like, why?”
On social media, many new mothers posted images of themselves with their newborn babies and loose bellies to offer an alternative, more realistic image of what a six-weeks-postpartum body actually looks like — still bleeding, still recovering. One new mother, newborn in hand, noted that the most she managed to do that day was brush her teeth.
“It is dangerous to pretend that working, especially being in a position to showcase your body, at six weeks is common or healthy,” Erin Erenberg, the co-founder and chief executive of Chamber of Mothers, a national nonprofit advocating for paid family leave and affordable child care. Since only 14 states and the District of Columbia offer mandatory paid family leave, almost 25 percent of women return to work within two weeks, she added.
But most women bleed heavily long after six weeks, Erenberg added, and for mothers who had a Cesarean delivery, the incision can take much longer than six weeks to heal, making simple actions, like sneezing or lifting the baby, painful. Walking in high heels becomes a very distant fantasy.
Six weeks after giving birth, mothers are also trying to figure out sleep schedules and breast feeding routines. In fact, Erenberg added, the recovery process can be so all-encompassing and strenuous that in states where there is little paid family leave, women could instead qualify for disability leave.
The fact that Palvin was one of many mothers on the runway that night, including Graham, Gigi Hadid and Jasmine Tookes (who last year walked the runway while pregnant), could be seen, in some way, as burnishing Victoria’s Secret’s image as a kind of progressive, accommodating haven.
But Natalia Rachlin, co-founder and co-editor of Mother Tongue, alongside Goldstein, cautioned against idealizing “bounce back culture.”
“What would have actually been radical,” she said, “is to see someone on the runway who looked postpartum in the way that most women do six weeks after giving birth.”
The post She Walked the Victoria’s Secret Show. Six Weeks After Giving Birth. appeared first on New York Times.
