It has, by all accounts, been the year of Anne Hathaway. With cultural juggernauts such as The Devil Wears Prada 2, Mother Mary, The End of Oak Street and The Odyssey all arriving on screens this year, she has also announced that she is expecting her third child with husband, Adam Shulman.
Naturally, she has been navigating multiple global press circuits, embracing maternity dressing with characteristic aplomb. That sartorial streak continued on Sunday, when Hathaway attended the world premiere of her forthcoming film, The End of Oak Street. Taking a cue from the Rihanna lexicon of maternity dressing, she wore a bump-baring, ice-blue Prabal Gurung top beneath a sweeping cape lined in contrasting crimson, paired with low-slung La Ligne jeans worn just below her bump.
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Yet, as is so often the case when a woman’s body becomes publicly visible, the negative commentary inevitably ensued. Questions began to accumulate beneath photographs of Hathaway on the carpet, with some people speculating that her bump was not real at all. Others went so far as to suggest it was prosthetic, with one commenter claiming that “they come in all sizes from 3 months to 9 months”.
While it seems glaringly obvious that a changing body isn’t an invitation for public debate, it seems women’s bodies will always be considered fair game for discussion.
Celebrities, particularly women, are plagued by endless probing and scrutiny surrounding their appearances. But there is something about pregnancy, too, that seems to give others permission to pass comment on your body, without prompt and without filter. It is an interesting phenomenon, and one that even Anne Hathaway can’t sidestep.
To clear things up, Hathaway took to Instagram to post a photo from the premiere with the caption: “fake hair, real bump.”
“The fact that other women were questioning her literal pregnant belly because ‘mine didn’t look like that’ is so strange to me,” one person wrote beneath the post.
Why is it that a woman putting her pregnant body on display is so often treated as an invitation to dissect, question and comment on it?
It is difficult not to consider how words like these might affect someone who is already navigating the physical and emotional demands of pregnancy while preparing to bring an entirely new human being into the world.
And the commentary doesn’t stop after birth. The discourse simply shifts, with people commenting on how quickly someone can “bounce back”, scrutinising how slowly or quickly their stomach is going down.
In the humble year of 2026, it begs the question: do we seriously not know better than this?
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