Best Postpartum Comfortable Clothes

The short answer

Keep your maternity clothes

Do not pack them away at the hospital. This is the single most useful thing on this page.

NHS guidance on your body after pregnancy and March of Dimes's material on the body after a baby both describe the uterus taking around six weeks to return to its pre-pregnancy size, with the abdominal wall taking longer. The practical result is that for the first weeks, maternity clothes fit and your old clothes do not.

Maternity leggings in particular are better postpartum clothing than most postpartum clothing: the panel is soft and high, so nothing presses on a healing abdomen or sits on an incision, and they accommodate a size that is changing week to week.

The two rules

No waistband. Nothing sitting at the level of a caesarean incision, and nothing digging into a midsection that is still tender and changing. That rules out most trousers and makes dresses, gowns and over-belly leggings the practical options.

Front access. If you are feeding, anything that has to come off over your head is a problem at 3am with a baby in one arm. Button-fronts, wrap tops, drop-down tanks and nursing panels all work; a crew-neck jumper does not.

Everything else is preference.

What to actually buy, in order

1. Two or three nursing tanks. The cheapest useful thing, layers under anything, solves the top half of every outfit.
2. One set of nursing pajamas with a robe. The fourth trimester uniform, and the robe is what makes it answerable-door respectable.
3. Your maternity leggings. Already owned. Keep them out.
4. Five or six pairs of high-waisted cotton underwear. See postpartum underwear.
5. Two nursing bras in a stretchy wireless style. Your size moves in the first fortnight, so buy few and stretchy. See nursing bras.
6. One knit dress, if you want to feel dressed. No waistband, looks deliberate.

That is six items, most of which you may already own. The impulse to buy a postpartum wardrobe is understandable and usually a mistake, because your size changes under it.

For the hospital

A gown rather than pajamas, for a reason that is not obvious: nothing sits on your abdomen, which after a caesarean is worth a great deal, and it is far easier to get on and off when movement hurts. ACOG's material on caesarean birth and the NHS's recovery guidance both describe how limited movement is in the first days.

Add a robe, dark and loose. Hospital corridors and unexpected visitors are both more manageable with one.

After a caesarean

The waistband rule stops being a preference and becomes the only rule. A low transverse incision sits exactly where most trousers do.

Gowns and dresses first, then over-belly maternity leggings, then high-waisted things that clear the incision. Nothing firm over the incision until it is fully healed and your own team is happy. See c-section recovery products.

Dark colors, and more of them

Practical rather than aesthetic. In the first weeks there is leaking — from you, from the baby, from your milk if you are feeding — and light colors show all of it.

Buy multipacks of the things that need washing most, because the laundry situation with a newborn is worse than people expect and having five of something cheap beats having one of something good.

How we picked

Six axes: waistband pressure, feeding access, whether it works at home and out, whether it fits a changing size, fabric comfort and value. Items with no feeding access score badly on that axis even when they are excellent clothes — the dress and the leggings both do — because a single rubric should show that rather than quietly excusing it.

We read the current listings and the reported experience; we have not used these. The method is on how we pick.

A note on the size question

If the not-fitting is upsetting rather than merely inconvenient, that is worth saying out loud to someone. MedlinePlus has material on weight after pregnancy, and ACOG has material on postpartum depression, which affects a great many people and is treatable.

Contact your provider for persistent low mood, anxiety, feeling unable to cope, or thoughts of harming yourself or your baby — at any point in the first year, not just the first weeks. Also for a fever, heavy bleeding, a wound that is hot or increasingly painful, severe one-sided calf pain, chest pain or breathlessness, or a severe headache with visual changes.