At their in-person wedding welcome party for about 80 guests, with fire pits and s’mores in Pescadero, Calif., a friend read a poem about superpowers. Theirs, the couple announced, was the ability to plan a wedding celebration while pregnant. Though Ms. Nguyen, a director of engineering at a communications software company, was six and a half months along, she wasn’t showing much and not all the couple’s guests knew she was expecting.
At their wedding reception, she and Mr. Pisacane, a director of regulatory affairs at a biotech company, displayed a Japanese maple tree with cards for guests to hang on the branches with parenting advice or suggestions for baby names. “We wanted a child so much, so for us it was just pure joy,” Ms. Nguyen said.
Still, planning a wedding while pregnant was not without its struggles. “‘What am I going to wear?’ became very tricky,” Ms. Nguyen recalled. The dress she had originally planned on wearing no longer fit by her wedding day, so she ultimately wore a pink dress purchased from the luxury resale site the RealReal. “White didn’t feel like quite the right color since I was pregnant,” Ms. Nguyen said.
Many pregnant brides, though, do opt for traditional white on their wedding day, supporting a growing industry of maternity bridal gowns. According to Tiffany London, founder of the British maternity brand Tiffany Rose, the company sold nearly 18,000 bridal dresses last year (more than 1,500 of them in the United States), and its U.S. wedding dress sales rose 35 percent from two years earlier. In January, the company introduced 10 new styles and its first maternity wedding skirt.
Sara-Lena Klaudrat, 31, a surgical nurse, wore Tiffany Rose to her August 2021 wedding to Lukas Klaudrat, 28, a police helicopter pilot. The couple wed before immediate family when the bride was seven months pregnant in Lech am Arlberg, Austria, near their home in Schruns.