13 Best Maternity Leggings I Tested While Pregnant
Maternity leggings will also serve you long after your baby arrives, making them a sustainable, investment purchase. If you’ve had a C-section and are feeling uncomfortable, there’s a plethora of specific leggings on offer that are designed with a stretchy fit and foldable flap to accommodate sore scars. If you’re breastfeeding and looking for a comfortable but practical ensemble, try pairing them with a white shirt with a nursing bra underneath.
As Lorna Jane Clarkson, founder of Lorna Jane activewear, explains: “I consider my activewear to be a metaphor for freedom and I wanted to give that same feeling to expectant and new mums.” Hear, hear.
Why you can trust us
Website Director, Bianca London, Commerce Photo Editor, Neamh Randall, and Fashion Editor, Charlie Teather, have all become first or second-time mums over the last few years, and – alongside, you know, prepping for one of humankind’s toughest physical feats and the subsequent life-altering reality of a tiny new human to care for 24/7 – rediscovering how to dress a body that was changing every single day posed a real challenge.
We didn’t want to lose our personal style identities – which, conveniently for those of you reading this for inspo, are all very different to one another’s – but we also wanted to celebrate and not just ‘disguise’ this incredible moment in our lives. And if we were finding this balance hard to strike, after working our whole adult lives in the fashion and magazine industry, we figured others must be too. So, we made it something of a personal/professional mission to compile the ultimate maternity fashion guides. If for nothing more than for us to refer back to if/when we ever do this pregnancy thing again, because (spoiler alert) baby brain is no joke, people…
How we tested the best maternity leggings
Throughout each of our pregnancies, we shopped for a whole host of maternity leggings, from on-trend leggings with ankle split detail to maternity gym leggings and new-in leather look maternity leggings. We’ve tried them out for sheerness (because there’s nothing worse than see-through leggings), comfort over their growing bump, and style. Bianca has also continued wearing them beyond birth to see how they adapted. See how they fared below.
