What should a mother wear? Shirley Hughes, my style icon

Family life as depicted by Hughes is beautifully messy. The houses are cluttered, shoes scuffed, gardens gorgeously overgrown. “Big feelings” are ever present to temper the sweetness, no Christmas passing without an overexcited child becoming “rather cross”. Parents are present, patient and fun – again, not a given – yet not beyond putting a cherished teddy in the bin or letting their toddler accidentally lock themselves in the house. Mostly set in London, there is often a vibrant village of friends, family and helpful neighbours, and she depicted multicultural communities in a way that always felt natural and joyful, not tokenistic. Forgiving a couple of culturally appropriative fancy-dress costumes, I’ve not had to hide any of her books for being wincingly problematic in the way I have with other writers of her era. But perhaps most significant of all are Shirley’s mums. Oh, the mums and their outfits.

I’m no stranger to the postnatal style crisis: that strange phenomenon whereby you acquire a child and lose all sense of how to dress. For the body you have now and the life you have now. For society’s ideas about what a mum should look like: Not too frumpy! Not too sexy! “Mum style” has become both a cruel punchline and a rich seam of content, with droves of shacketed mumfluencers guiding us away from a fate worse than a floral midi dress and trainers. Even two years on, I still have regular meltdowns over whether or not to tuck in a T-shirt.

But there is something about the functional chic of a Shirley Hughes mother that makes me feel seen. Hers are mums that look like the mums I knew then, with the spirit of the mums I know now. Behold! Dogger’s mum in her natty little bandana, cropped cords and sandals. Alfie’s mum in stonewashed jeans and pixie boots. Angel Mae’s heavily pregnant mum in her pink dungarees. Bernard’s long-suffering mum in top-to-toe butter yellow.

Not for them the dowdy blouse and apron of Jill Murphy’s Mrs Bear, or the neat cardie of The Tiger Who Came to Tea mum (a woman who prepares a hotel-scale afternoon tea for her five-year-old). They are mums in jeans and statement earrings and halterneck swimsuits, scaling hills and leaping through waves. Mums who look precisely the right amount of frazzled. Mums with chaotic hair and rumpled shirts, but who nonetheless retain an air of youth and a strong sense of personal style, their energy captured in those kinetic sketches. On the days I feel lowest, weariest and furthest from my old self, Shirley’s mums remind me of who I am – or at least, how I like to dress.

Casual has never been my sartorial happy place. “Relaxed”, “nonchalant” and “thrown-on” have no place in my vocabulary, unless as euphemisms for “creased”. But once you have a kid, something has to give. A lifelong jeans refusenik, I knew that motherhood was going to force me into denim and I’ve accepted it with the same stoicism that I accept being handed a half-eaten banana to put in my coat pocket for later, or wiping a streaming nose with my bare hand. I now have three pairs of jeans I don’t actively hate (flared indigo, wide-leg mid-blue, straight-but-loose faded black) and wear them on rotation for every occasion that might require squatting in a pit, be it sand or ball.

But on child-free days, I’ve gone to the other extreme and started wearing a lot of silly little skirts and knee-high boots. Sheer fabrics. Jaunty scarves. Cashmere and suede. Not young – as we know, the youth are all wearing boob tubes and hoodies in a rainbow of khaki and grey; nothing more clearly marks a person as being over 35 than having visibly co-ordinated a colour palette – but at least, gleefully impractical. And, dare I say, flirty? Flirting with the memory of a former life, where I didn’t have banana slime in my pockets. This is what I love most about Hughes’s mums. Through their wardrobes we get glimpses of who they were and are, beyond mothering.

In the seminal leaky-roof thriller An Evening at Alfie’s, we see Alfie’s mum glammed up for date night in sheer tights and heels, her curls swept up with a clasp in a style I remember from my own mother’s perm era. Dave’s mum in Dogger appears at the school fête in a leaf-green, puff-sleeved number that could be Rejina Pyo, and as a lifelong overdresser I identify deeply with the need to turn out a look for any event going. In 1975’s deliciously groovy Helpers, the kids are left with long-haired babysitter George while their mum heads out for the day in flares and clogs. Lucy and Tom’s mum takes a cake out of the oven in a pair of improbable acid-green kitten heels and I love her for it. Miuccia Prada might, too. Whether it’s the spring/summer ’25 catwalks or the school gate circa ’88, that mix of the slouchy and functional with the bold and whimsical looks as good now as it always has.

Though Hughes’s illustrations are faithful to their eras, they don’t feel like retro throwbacks – evidence that good style really is timeless, or perhaps just that the way mums of small children want to dress hasn’t changed all that much. We want to look playful, but not clownish. Like elegant adult women, not overgrown toddlers. And for God’s sake, give us a few fripperies. Give us big sleeves, daft collars, exquisite details. Sharp cuts but soft, forgiving fabrics. Clothes that celebrate our miraculous bodies but, crucially, don’t demand too much of them. No complicated underwear; nothing that’s going to dig in, ride up or fall down. We’re already being pulled in so many directions.

Hughes herself was a lover of bold colours and sharp accessories, particularly hats. “The trick to wearing a hat is to wear it a lot,” she once told Jane Garvey in a Radio 4 interview. “And don’t walk around as though you’re balancing something on your head – forget you’re wearing it.” It’s good advice, especially for those in the throes of a postnatal style crisis. Wear something that makes your soul sing, then try to forget all about it.

Never in her books are the clothes mentioned or made a focus – like the messy houses and the big feelings and the diverse neighbourhoods, they are simply allowed to be. Life as it is. Mums as they are, evolving alongside their children. Families in flux, held still for a moment on the page.

On Mother’s Day this year I wore a dress. Lilac, printed cotton, quilted bodice, balloon sleeves. Not casual, not practical, not young or especially cool, but undeniably me. It flapped in the breeze as I stomped up and down Brighton beach playing a new game my husband and toddler have invented that involves a lot of running and screaming (guaranteed fun for the under-threes… And the over-threes as it happens). Another mum stopped me as we headed back, and said, “I love your dress. I saw you standing by the sea just now with it blowing in the wind and thought, ‘Someone should take a photo of her!’”

Nobody did, obviously – husbands are as they are – and besides, it was too late. The moment was gone, and so was my daughter, just a streak of snot in red dungarees on the horizon. I thanked the woman over my shoulder as I broke into a run, waving a tissue.

But I like to think Shirley would have done me justice.