Negotiating Pregnancy, Birth And Baby Loss When You Make Your Living As An Influencer

As soon as I mentioned my first pregnancy to my followers on Instagram back in 2018, I was dropped from two substantial projects that had been long in the works. I failed to book a single collaboration for the last five months of my pregnancy. At 16 weeks I could still fit into a size eight, but the fact that I was carrying a child immediately made me ‘off-brand’ for the many fashion and lifestyle labels that advertised on my platform – and they made no bones about it.

To give you a little bit of background, I wasn’t an early social media pioneer. By trade I’m a journalist and I have a master’s degree in fashion history. I have written for major publications in the UK and the US and I run my own content agency. In 2014, while working as a fashion editor at Grazia, I started an Instagram account that soon attracted a few thousand followers and has since grown to 59k – mostly women, mostly over 30. I now earn a big proportion of my salary from collaborations with brands on Instagram, then spend the majority of my time writing for far less money. I feel extremely fortunate that my boss instructed me to set up my Instagram account – there’s no way I would have been able to buy a flat or support my family without it and I’m not offended by being described as an influencer. But it’s fashion and writing that are the backbone of my career; Instagram is just another (admittedly far more lucrative) platform for me to showcase my skills.

When I got pregnant, I had presumed, perhaps foolishly, that the fashion brands I work with would want to continue to work with me, at least until my third trimester. But I soon realised that wasn’t the case. Over the past two years I’ve spoken with countless other women with social media influence (some with audiences in the millions) and they have all reported the same: an instant, dramatic drop in jobs; a decline in invitations to industry events; and a sense that they are no longer relevant to any of the brands they’ve been working with for years. Some of the women I spoke to mentioned a spike in engagement from their audiences, others said they lost a substantial amount of followers. What was universal was the serious drop in earnings. Reflecting the experiences of the 11% of UK women that are pushed out, made redundant or simply fired countrywide while pregnant (totaling 54,000 a year), social media is a space where pregnant women are professionally discriminated against.

At first, I really wanted to understand it from the brands’ point of view, because so many of the contacts I had at these labels were women, many of whom had families. Off-record they all brought up pretty much the same two reasons. By working with an ‘openly pregnant’ woman, they would be suggesting they had a maternity line and (more depressingly) apparently people don’t buy things that pregnant women wear. Elsewhere, PRs working for skin and haircare brands said that if they worked officially with a pregnant influencer, consumers would presume a product must be specifically targeted for them (‘creams must be for stretch marks, shampoo must be for hair loss’). This is probably accurate. Because we so rarely see pregnant women in fashion and lifestyle advertising and marketing, they’re perceived as an ‘other’ with their choices deemed irrelevant to ‘normal’ non-pregnant women. Even when brands do offer maternity lines, they often use non-pregnant teenage models with prosthetic bumps to sell them.

Pregnancy is an unusual moment in your identity, because you are simultaneously a majority and minority. Over 80% of women will be pregnant before the age of 45 but only 2% of women are pregnant at any one time. During pregnancy, it is presumed that the ‘normal’ things women need are no apparently longer relevant to you. Which isn’t quite true. During my 40 weeks, I gained 40lbs and went from a 32A to a 36G. At the end my belly measured in the top 1% of circumference in the country and I gave birth to a 10-pound bouncer. Yes, I’m slim, but I definitely didn’t have a subtle pregnancy. However, I still wore the same jewellery, oversized jackets, bags, knits, coats and shoes. I used the same moisturizer and shampoo. Sure, I had to buy maternity jeans, and a couple of bras and stretchy dresses but that really was it. This idea that you are no longer a customer for all the shops and brands you’ve always loved is just hogwash.

Last August I got pregnant again. It was a massive shock as I’d been horribly ill with Hepatitis A and hadn’t had my period for months, plus we’d struggled with infertility the first time around. Though we hadn’t been trying, we were overjoyed to be adding to our family. The only fly in the ointment was how I was going to be able to work. So, I made a strategic decision to keep the pregnancy a secret until I got to 28 weeks, something I knew was going to be tough.

I didn’t mention the months of morning sickness and instead took rolls of pictures with a photographer during my first trimester with the plan to post them over the following months. November and December are my biggest earning months of the year, so I knew I had to keep it going at least until then and it definitely became trickier and trickier when new jobs came in – the boobs were as hard to conceal as the bump. Then the worst happened. At our 20-week scan we were told that our baby was very unwell and were given a horrendous prognosis. We decided to terminate. I was admitted into hospital and gave birth on my 36th birthday, to a little silent baby I would never know. It was as traumatic and heartbreaking as you could imagine and I’m a long way from being able to accept or reconcile it.

As I hadn’t told my followers I was pregnant, I could have just started posting pictures that concealed my postpartum body but when I looked around me, I saw so many of my friends with bodies in a state of flux. I am far from the only person in my circle to have lost a baby. I’ve seen my own body drop nearly 60lbs through postpartum weight loss and illness, gain nearly half of it back again in pregnancy then start losing it all over again after baby loss. Lots of us are living in bodies that change and shift as we navigate these child-bearing years of our lives. And that is what we shop for: shape-shifting clothing that follows our bodies through the peaks and troughs.

This is where brands need to get real. Pregnancy is an incredibly vulnerable time and the labels that show us their support stand to win our loyalty. The ones that try and sell us maternity jeans via plastic bumps on teenagers? Not so much. When I decided to talk about my experiences online, I started the hashtag #styleateverystage, which I’m now using to highlight any outfit that fits my not pregnant body, but would also accommodate a burgeoning baby belly. The pieces are cut oversized, empire-line or with ample stretch and they work for body fluidity in a way that helps you keep your personal style while going through these changes. I hope it inspires other women while making a clear point to retailers that ditching pregnant influencers isn’t the only option. My childbearing era started when I began trying to conceive at 32 and I’m still only (hopefully) partway through at 36. Who knows whether I’ll conceive again or what’s going to happen to my body. But I know that if I get pregnant again, I don’t want to have to suck my stomach in for months to protect my living. And if I don’t say something now, nothing will change.

Katherine Ormerod is a journalist, author and influencer working in London. Her debut book Why Social Media is Ruining Your Life is now out in paperback.

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