Showing? Today’s pregnant woman taking opportunity to show it off

Jennifer Kolitch, a mother of four in New York, recalls with clarity a defining moment during her latest pregnancy last year.

“I was having a very good hair day, wearing my Seven jeans and a black tank top with a black knit shrug and little black ballerina flats,” she said. “I was shopping for a pair of sunglasses, and the saleswoman came up to me and said, ‘Oh, you are so Angelina Jolie-pregnant.’

“It made my day,” she recalled.

In invoking Jolie, who looked alluring throughout her recent and widely seen pregnancy, the saleswoman paid Kolitch the ultimate compliment. She affirmed her status as a member of the chic maternity brigade.

Was it only a half dozen years ago that expectancy was viewed primarily as an awkward condition to be borne with what grace one could muster? Today women flaunt their pregnancies, take them public on Web sites and blogs and show them off with low-slung jeans, slinky tunics and dresses that mimic those on the runways.

The phenomenon is in part a result of women who delay pregnancy into their 30s, when their tastes in fashion are more refined and they have the income to indulge. Some are also clearly inspired by expectant film stars like Jolie who parade through the gossip magazines, their every coffee break and shopping spree chronicled in “belly bump patrols.”

“We have gone from a cultural mind-set of pregnancy being an endgame, with the focus on the moment the baby is born — I’m going to get through this; I’ll wear what I have to wear — to one that is very much focused on the experience of the journey,” said Julia Beck, the founder of Forty Weeks, a marketing company in Washington that studies expectant and new parents. “Pregnancy has become its own focal point.”

One with its own lustrous image, for sure. While stylish maternity fashions were once scarce, today there are scores.

“We have seen an explosion in fashionable maternity clothes,” said Maria-Stefania Vavylopoulou, the fashion editor of Plum, a magazine for pregnant women in their 30s, the fastest-growing market for high-style maternity clothes. “All kinds of designers have jumped on the wagon, and the people who have traditionally worked on maternity lines have updated their style focus dramatically.”

As recently as five years ago, the dominant (some would say solitary) force in maternity fashion was Liz Lange, the design pioneer who dressed Manhattan’s gilded set. Today the field encompasses a raft of coveted brands

“It used to be about one company,” said Emilia Fabricant, the owner and chief executive of the progressive Cadeau maternity line. “Now it’s a whole movement.”

Diane Von Furstenberg, Lilly Pulitzer and style-driven labels like Chaiken, Juicy Couture, Vince and Theory have all entered the arena in the last 18 months, some with a style quotient so high that their looks are coveted by nonpregnant women.

“You can spot those women in the store,” Fabricant said. “Sometimes they will look at a top or two, and it’s, ‘Oh, I’m looking for my friend.’”

The proliferation of style-driven maternity clothes “has been a big part of the whole glamorization of maternity,” said Rebecca Matthias, the president of Mothers Work.

The modern notion of pregnancy as a fashionably exalted state may have begun in 1991 when Demi Moore, eight months pregnant, appeared in the buff on the cover of Vanity Fair.

“It was the first time people started talking about ‘pregnancy’ and ‘beautiful’ in the same breath,” Matthias said. That image, then the talk of the magazine industry, caused retailers in conservative parts of the country to pull the issue from their newsstands.

The pendulum has now swung so far in the opposite direction that heavily pregnant stars like Catherine Zeta-Jones and Rachel Weisz have paraded the red carpet at the Academy Awards, a gesture that not long ago would have been surprising. And Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar publish images of demiclad expectant celebrities on their covers.

The phenomenon seemed to have reached a critical mass in March, when the celebrity magazine Star weighed in with four divas — Katie Holmes, Gwen Stefani, Gwyneth Paltrow and Jolie — all with beach-ball bellies on its cover.

Merchants and manufacturers say that the image of the pregnant glamazon speaks most persuasively to older women, many of whom are having first or second children in their 30s. In 2002, the last year for which figures are available, there were 951,000 births by women 30 to 34, compared with 375,000 in 1975, according to the National Center for Health Statistics.

Retailers say that expectant mothers over 30 are a sizable portion of the 5.5 million women who bought or received maternity clothing in the last year, according to the NPD Group, which tracks consumer trends.

Among older first-time mothers, “the whole concept of postponing pregnancy has made becoming pregnant a bit more of an obsession,” said Rebekah Meola, the founder and publisher of Plum. “The more you wait, the more you are thinking about it.”

Not surprisingly, older mothers, with established careers and rising levels of sophistication, are the target demographic for retailers and manufacturers.

Jane Buckingham, a youth trend forecaster and an author of “The Modern Girl’s Guide to Motherhood” (Regan Books, 2006), said that among the older pregnant population, prominent bellies have become a badge of honor. A mother of two herself, Buckingham, 37, pointed to a new assertiveness among mothers-to-be.

“These women feel important when they’re pregnant,” she said. “Because it is their first time, and because so many of them have had trouble conceiving, pregnancy has become something to flaunt.”

First-time mothers, of course, are not the only ones showing off. Even experienced mothers like Jennifer Kolitch have undergone a shift in attitude about their looks.

“For me, psychologically, it was always, ‘How long can I make it in my regular clothes,”‘ she said of her first pregnancy six years ago. Then she was reluctant to begin wearing maternity clothes, which in her mind signified that she was looking fat.

“But this time around, I wanted to flaunt my pregnancy,” said Kolitch, 35, whose youngest child is 1 month old. “When you finally get to that crossover point, when you’re actually looking pregnant, that is a really nice thing.”