It only took five weeks. Last weekend, Victoria Beckham was back in her size six jeans with high heels, with perfect manicure and blow dry. This is, perhaps, a new record - even Liz Hurley took six weeks to recover from the birth of Damian, before posing in swimwear - but it highlights a burgeoning trend. These days, having a baby - even having just had a baby - is not considered an excuse for letting slip in the style stakes.
Some women make it look so easy. Jori White, 36, who runs a London PR agency, always looks immaculate - and distinctly un-mummyish - in Missoni knitwear and pale trouser suits. Having four-year-old daughter Sky might have changed her style, she admits, but it has not destroyed it.
"I carry things back and forth to my office and home in carrier bags depending on what I'm doing. If things get dirty, they get dirty. And if Sky looks like she is going to get sticky bits on it, then I'll just shout, 'be careful of what mummy's wearing'."
Jori White is one of the many mothers who have to bridge the gap between looking professional (and stylish) for work and spending the maximum time possible with their children. Unlike celebrity mums such as Sarah Jessica Parker, Uma Thurman and Kate Moss, White and her ilk are not able to keep two separate wardrobes, one for time spent at home and one for the working day - this is impossible, when the nursery run blends straight into your journey to work. And so it is that women like White find themselves juggling two style personalities. They are half-mummy, half-human, racing between the sartorial demands of an office and the rather different ones of a spewing infant, with no time to change.
This is exactly the blurred division I have in my life as a writer: I look after my 17-month-old boy for a few hours, drop him with a childminder, run off to a job, then back again, then out again. My one-time "best" clothes (sale-bought Diane von Furstenberg and Alberta di Ferretti dresses, Brora cardigans) have become everyday wear because otherwise I would just never wear them.
The television presenter Claudia Winkleman, 33, mother of Jake, two, agrees: "For me a normal day is spending the morning at the aquarium with my son, rushing home to give him lunch and put him to bed, handing him over to dad or nanny, rushing off to do a voiceover - where I am supposed to look professional - then rushing back home again before going out to some sort of work party - where I also have to look half-decent." Post-baby, she has had to streamline her wardrobe. "It should make me more boring but I think my clothes have got better - I used to think about it too much. And I used to wear too much make-up."
Mariella Frostrup, 42, author and broadcaster, leads a similar in-out lifestyle with Molly Mae, eight months, and needs to wear things that will take her from home (where she has a nanny) to studio to home again. Her style has regressed, she admits, but it is a change for the good: "I've started to wear far fewer of my clothes. You want everything to be simpler - you're expending so much on the baby that the energy you once reserved for dressing is used up on other things. I think, if anything, I look better. I've gone right back to the clothes I wore as a teenager, liberated from the constraints of fashion. I wear cords and a sweater, or jeans and smock tops with a cardigan."
For formal events, Frostrup finds she wears the same labels as before (Ghost, Armani, Nicole Farhi) but only because she has always worn flexible pieces that can be dragged about the place: "I've always carried a top for dinner in the evening in the bottom of my handbag because if you leave in the morning and you've got a radio interview and then a screening, there's no time to come home." Baby just means the bag is even bigger.
White runs her company between an office in London's Soho and home in Shepherd's Bush. She works (and entertains as part of her job) round the clock but does half a day a week from home with her daughter. "Since Sky has been around I'm much more relaxed in what I wear. I was much more business-like - high heels and Gucci suits. I'm more of a hippy now, I'm chilled. I used to always wear high heels for the office. Now I wear trainers, and heels are only for going out."
She wears Missoni, Gharani Strok, Voyage, a few Prada skirts. The most important thing, she says, is colour: "I gave up wearing black when Sky was born. I have a great Voyage jacket - a neutral colour with orange flowers and ribbons embroidered on it. It goes with everything. I wear it far too much."
Winkleman agrees that if you spend any time with a child you cannot wear black. "Colour is important, and don't worry about heels. Uggs are great. All boots are great, but they must be flat." She swears by Diane von Furstenberg dresses - "the leopard print or the one with pink and green spots" - worn on their own or with jeans, Marc Jacobs separates and the half-human's holy grail, Topshop: "The greatest shop on earth. Because even though I'm a mum I refuse to give up on fashion - I can decide that I am going to make tweed work at the zoo and find a jacket for £30."
Frostrup also does Topshop: "I have learned to cope with the hysteria of it. I'm brave enough to go, but only on a Monday morning first thing before the young people arrive. You can afford to buy eight different tops instead of one so that in the hurly-burly of living post-baby there is always something to slip on."
Perhaps it makes sense that this approach will actually improve the way you look. Anu Mirchandani, 32, is owner of the Notting Hill boutique Ananya - she had her son Rohail when she was 22 and it profoundly affected what she wanted to wear: "I felt like I was losing out on my youth and so I actually got more into fashion and wanting to look good. I had put on a lot of weight and desperately wanted to be hip and trendy. Before I used to wear Joseph and very conservative stuff, then I started to wear more Notting Hill market stuff, jeans, Matthew Williamson. I think when you've had a baby you're just desperate to get back into nice clothes."
The lack of time can actually be incredibly liberating, says Frostrup. "You stop thinking that your life and moments in it are going to be defined by what you've got on. It takes away that awful obsession with clothes that identifies so many single women. When I think of the fortune I spent on them thinking it would change my life . . ."
Winkleman agrees. "Before, I was worried about looking serious and young and a little bit together. Now I am definitely not together. Of course there is nothing that excites me more than a pair of cashmere pants, but I think you stop agonising over it all. You just buy stuff and you try to get value in a way that you didn't when you could be selfish."
