What to wear to a baby shower when nothing fits (a survival guide)

Sarah was wedged inside a floral maternity dress that had, seemingly overnight, transformed from breezy summer elegance into a highly restrictive sausage casing. It was mid-July, she was thirty-two weeks pregnant with the twins, and our own baby shower was scheduled to commence in our back garden in precisely forty-five minutes. She was standing in the center of our bedroom surrounded by a mountain of discarded ASOS packages, weeping softly while holding a shoe that no longer fit her left foot. Before we had the twins, my only frame of reference for these events was from American sitcoms (I had vaguely assumed it was some sort of competitive baby show where people paraded around judging the plushness of incoming infants), but the reality was just me, sweating profusely, trying to figure out if I could wear shorts to an event that involved my mother-in-law.

If you're currently carrying a baby, or if you've been invited to watch someone else carry a baby while eating miniature quiches, you're probably staring at your wardrobe in despair. It's a bizarrely specific dress code. You want to look celebratory without appearing as though you're heading to a nightclub, comfortable enough to sit through two hours of opening cardboard boxes, and, crucially, capable of surviving sudden, catastrophic temperature fluctuations.

The great maternity clothing deception

Let’s start with the guest of honour. Our NHS midwife, a terrifyingly competent woman named Brenda (who seemed to derive deep personal joy from telling me I was installing the car seat wrong), mumbled something during a check-up about third-trimester peripheral edema being perfectly normal. From my rather hazy, sleep-deprived understanding of human biology, your blood volume basically doubles when pregnant, meaning gravity does incredibly cruel things to your lower half, turning standard feet into something resembling inflated surgical gloves.

This means your footwear strategy must be rooted entirely in surrender. At our shower, Sarah eventually abandoned the concept of shoes altogether and wore a pair of highly supportive, vaguely orthopedic slip-on sandals that she previously wouldn't have been caught dead wearing to take the bins out. And thank God she did, because a baby shower involves an absurd amount of standing around accepting unsolicited advice from distant relatives about cabbage leaves and nipple cream.

As for the actual outfit, the maternity fashion industry has perpetrated a massive fraud on the pregnant public by insisting everything should feature stiff empire waistlines or complicated belts. Ignore them. Wrap dresses are the only things that will save you, purely because they adjust to the minute-by-minute expansion of your ribcage, allowing you to actually ingest the cake that your friends have spent entirely too much money on without feeling like you're going to spontaneously combust.

Why I wore a linen suit to assemble a nappy cake

Co-ed baby showers are now the norm, which I fully support, but it completely ruins the male weekend uniform of old football shirts and jeans that have lost their structural integrity. Because I panicked and wanted to match the gravity of the occasion, I wore a light linen suit jacket to our shower. This was a catastrophic error.

Within fourteen minutes of the first guest arriving, I was instructed to construct a complicated display involving three dozen rolled-up nappies and some ribbon. Then I had to carry an ice bucket roughly the weight of a small car across the lawn. By the time someone suggested we play a game involving guessing melted chocolate bars inside nappies (a deeply distressing activity that I still have nightmares about), my linen jacket was adhered to my spine with nervous sweat, and I looked like a man who had just survived a shipwreck.

Partners, listen to me: wear a high-quality cotton t-shirt or a very breathable chambray button-down, and whatever you do, don't wear trousers that restrict your ability to abruptly squat down to pick up dropped pieces of wrapping paper.

Gifts that double as emergency sweat rags (a true story)

It was during the peak of my linen-suit-sweat-crisis that my mate Dave, entirely bewildered by the concept of a baby shower, thrust a gift bag into my chest. Inside was the Kianao Organic Cotton Baby Blanket with the calming gray whale pattern. I'm not proud of this, but in a moment of sheer desperation, I used the corner of this supposedly pristine newborn gift to mop my forehead.

I stopped mid-wipe. It was, without exaggeration, the softest piece of fabric I had ever encountered in my thirty-four years on earth. Dave had accidentally knocked it out of the park. Fast forward two years, and the twins currently fight over this exact whale blanket with the ferocity of stray dogs fighting over a ham bone. It's GOTS-certified, which basically means it was made without the toxic chemicals usually found in conventional cotton, but all I know is that it survived my sweaty forehead and roughly four hundred cycles in our washing machine, and it still looks brilliant.

If you're attending a shower and desperately searching for a gift that the parents will actually use (instead of shoving in the loft next to the Christmas tree), have a look at the Kianao baby blanket collection before you panic-buy something neon and plastic.

The guest dress code minefield

If you're just attending the shower, your job is very simple: look nice, eat the finger sandwiches, and don't upstage the woman who's currently growing a human skeleton inside her body. Yet, somehow, people manage to bungle this.

Auntie Susan arrived at our garden shower wearing four-inch stilettos. We live in London. Our garden is essentially a patch of damp moss masquerading as grass. For three hours, she was aerating the lawn, sinking up to her ankles with every step, smiling thinly while holding a glass of elderflower pressé. It was excruciating to watch. If the invitation says "backyard" or "garden," your footwear needs a flat surface area roughly the size of a dinner plate.

As for the colours, wear whatever you want, just don't turn up in a full bridal gown or look like you're attending a funeral.

A brief word on fabrics when your core temperature resembles the sun

Pregnancy alters your internal thermostat to the point where you could comfortably sit in a meat freezer in December and still feel a bit flushed. If you wear polyester, acrylic, or any synthetic blend to a baby shower, you're effectively wrapping yourself in clingfilm.

When you're buying gifts for the baby, the same rule applies. Someone at our shower bought us a miniature polyester tuxedo for the twins, which is objectively hilarious but utterly useless unless you want your newborn to develop a heat rash while looking like a tiny James Bond. What you actually want is the Kianao Organic Baby Romper Henley Jumpsuit. It's 95% organic cotton, meaning it seriously breathes, and it has these little button closures that don't require a master's degree in engineering to figure out at 3am when you're operating on four minutes of sleep. It's practical, it's soft, and it doesn't make the baby look like they're late for a casino royale.

The aesthetic trap of wooden toys

While we're on the subject of gifts that get opened at these parties, we need to talk about the pressure of the "aesthetic nursery." Someone very generously gifted us the Kianao Wild Western Wooden Baby Gym at our shower.

Look, I'll be completely honest with you: it's fine. The craftsmanship is objectively beautiful, and the little wooden buffalo is quite sweet. It looks absolutely cracking in the nursery photos, which made Sarah very happy. But at month four, Matilda just lay there staring at the crocheted cactus with an expression of deep, existential dread, and I spend most of my evenings trying not to stub my toe on the wooden A-frame in the dark. If you're going to buy it for a shower, know that you're buying it for the parents' Instagram feed as much as for the baby's motor skills (which, honestly, is a perfectly valid reason to buy a gift, just know what you're doing).

Surviving the afternoon

Ultimately, getting dressed for a baby shower—whether you're the one with the swollen ankles or the bloke tasked with assembling the buggy while making small talk with someone's great-aunt—is an exercise in humility. Read the invitation, throw on something that won't make you sweat through your lining during the nappy-guessing game, and accept that your feet will likely hurt by 4pm.

The baby doesn't care what you're wearing anyway. They're just waiting to ruin whatever nice shirt you put on the moment they learn how to produce projectile spit-up.

Ready to buy a baby shower gift that won't end up immediately re-gifted or shoved in the loft? Browse the Kianao organic essentials collection to find something that honestly helps exhausted parents.

Questions I still get asked about baby shower outfits

Do I've to wear pastel colours?

No, please don't feel obligated to dress like an Easter egg unless you genuinely want to. I spent our entire shower looking at a sea of mint green and pale yellow, and it felt like I was trapped inside a packet of Mini Eggs. Just wear something comfortable and vaguely upbeat.

Is it rude for a guest to wear jeans?

Depends entirely on the jeans and the venue. If it's a pub lunch shower, a dark, clean pair of jeans with a nice top is absolutely fine. If you rock up to a posh afternoon tea at a hotel wearing ripped denim that looks like you've just finished re-tiling your bathroom, people are going to judge you. It’s unfair, but it’s true.

Can the partner wear shorts if it's boiling outside?

I fought this battle and lost. Unless you're having a shower on an actual beach, put some lightweight trousers on. Your hairy calves don't need to be immortalised in the background of eighty different photographs of your partner opening breast pump attachments.

What's the best thing for the mum-to-be to wear for all the photos?

Whatever she feels least trapped in. Sarah started the day stressing about looking "radiant" and ended the day taking her sandals off under the table and hiding behind a mountain of wrapping paper. Pick a breathable natural fabric (cotton or linen), make sure you can sit down in it without the seams screaming for mercy, and rely on the sheer glow of pregnancy (which is mostly just sweat) to carry the photos.

Should I coordinate my outfit with the shower theme?

If the invite explicitly asks you to wear a certain colour, play along to keep the peace. But if the theme is something abstract like "Woodland Creatures" or "Wild Western," please don't turn up dressed as a badger or a cowboy. Just bring a nice, practical gift, eat your weight in finger food, and offer to help take the recycling out honestly. That's the best accessory you can possibly bring.