It's sometimes hard to work out the significance of Lady Gaga's wardrobe. It's all very well saying "directional", fashion ladies, but you never seem to specify which direction. On Sunday night, she emerged from a gold coffin, on a stage in Carlisle, wearing a prosthetic baby bump. She did one song – Born this Way – and then flung it off. Having said she's hard to read, I think we can decode this a bit more easily than the meat suit. I think she's saying "enough with the bump-fetish, ladies. Enough with the Elemental Woman fandango. Sure, it's something to celebrate, the giving of new life, but do we have to start celebrating before it's even arrived? Whither the modest smock dress?"
Demi Moore's seminal bump, the one who started all this (I don't know if we can, in fairness, blame Scout Willis), is now 19. Like the world's first test-tube baby, she's important not because she did anything, but because she marks the age of the trend. It is as unthinkable now to expect a woman to cover her bump as it was, 20 years ago, to expect her to pose naked with it. But the mood is probably going the other way: not all the way back to Lady Di in box pleats, just some of the way, towards a point where a bump is accepted but not worshipped.
The problem with the snake-who-swallowed-a-football look is that, to an untrained or even trained eye, it can look a bit smug. It looks a bit smug to people who aren't pregnant, this lavish assertion that true femininity is only achieved once there are two of you. It also looks a bit smug to people who are pregnant but are having what we call the unphotogenic pregnancy, where you look like a walrus from every conceivable angle. And this constituency – the non-pregnant plus the fat pregnant – is certainly large enough to stage its own backlash. Lady Gaga is just lobbing its opening shot: "Come on . . . all you did was have sex": that's the subtext of this prosthetic.
