Review: Nursing Tops

Liv­ing in Ger­many means that I see a lot of nurs­ing moms who don’t bother with nurs­ing tops. I don’t quite have their body con­fi­dence or their quickly regained svelte fig­ures, so I pre­fer to keep my fat rolls under cover by wear­ing nurs­ing tops when I expect to be breast­feed­ing in public.

The most read­ily avail­able tops in Ger­many are H&M Mama nurs­ing shirts (avail­able online in Scan­di­navia, Ger­many and Aus­tria). These shirts are pretty comfy and at 19.90 Euro, are pretty afford­able. The down­side is that they tend to lose shape after sev­eral wash­ings, and I also find the nurs­ing open­ings to be a lit­tle more dif­fi­cult to use than other tops, although with prac­tice, I did get used to them.

By my Christ­mas visit to the US, Oliver had been nurs­ing for six months and I knew that we would con­tinue our nurs­ing rela­tion­ship for quite some time. After try­ing on every­thing at Tar­get and find­ing that noth­ing fit, I decided to invest a lit­tle in nice nurs­ing shirts and ordered three tops from Japan­ese Week­end (avail­able mostly in North Amer­ica, but the web­site does list a cou­ple of inter­na­tional shops). At $60-$80 a pop, I was a lit­tle dis­ap­pointed in the qual­ity upon open­ing the box they arrived in. I expected the same qual­ity that a sim­i­larly priced non-maternity shirt would have. They are nice shirts, and the nurs­ing open­ings are great, but I wouldn’t con­sider them quite worth the money. I should also note that the styles I bought are no longer being shown on their web­site. Any­ways, I wore my Japan­ese Week­end tops hap­pily for another cou­ple months, then decided I needed some fur­ther vari­ety in my wardrobe.

In ran­dom surf­ing, I came across Gap­Ma­ter­nity’s nurs­ing sec­tion and decided to order a cou­ple of their tops. The price was right, at about $35 each, but unfor­tu­nately they only shipped within the US. I shipped them to a rel­a­tive and had them sent on to me. These are by far the best price/quality-ratio nurs­ing shirts I’ve come across. The stretch cot­ton shirts are styl­ish, flat­ter­ing, and com­fort­able with easy to use nurs­ing access.

I’d read a lot of good things about Boob, a Swedish mater­nity and nurs­ing cloth­ing com­pany, so I pur­chased a cou­ple of nurs­ing sin­glets (tank tops, 35 Euro each) and a nurs­ing camisole (40 Euros). The cloth­ing is soft and stretchy. The camisole would be great for wear­ing while preg­nant or while you’ve still got your preg­nancy tummy, but now that mine has shrunk pretty much back to nor­mal size, I just feel preg­nant in the camisole. In other words, it’s not all that flat­ter­ing. The nurs­ing sin­glets are awe­some though. They hug me in just the right places, dis­guis­ing my fat folds while mak­ing me feel skinny. Boob’s cloth­ing is avail­able pretty much world wide through stores that can be found using the store locater on their web­site.

Finally, I heard about a UK brand pop­u­lar with all the posh nurs­ing mamas, Isabella Oliver. I sup­pose I was on a reck­less online shop­ping spree at the time, cause I decided to order their nurs­ing tops (they’ve got two, and have come out with a nurs­ing dress for the fall as well) to see what all the fuss was about. At 90 Euro a piece (now 85 Euro), I thought that they could be great pieces that I could wear when I wanted to dress up a bit. I also fig­ured that if I didn’t love them, I could return them and my curios­ity would be sated. Well, the matte jer­sey fab­ric is fab­u­lous. It drapes in just the right way and the cuts are flat­ter­ing. The nurs­ing open­ings are per­fect and I feel glam­orous wear­ing the tops. Get­ting a lit­tle glam in my life as a nurs­ing mother is worth the higher price! And if you order the dress and a nurs­ing top together right now, you get 25 Euro off the price of order­ing them sep­a­rately. Isabella Oliver has US, Cana­dian, UK and EU online shops.

What’s your favorite brand of nurs­ing attire?

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Tagged as: Boob, Breastfeeding, GapMaternity, H&M Mama, Isabella Oliver, Japanese Weekend, nursing attire, nursing tops