One of my favorite aspects of life in Washington, DC, has always been the ability to drive across town and spend a few hours in another country. Recently I was sitting behind the wheel of my car on one of the many stately but narrow residential streets abutting Woodley Park, waiting for the valet to wave me forward into Lebanon—or at least the residence of its ambassador. I watched as other guests strode up the walkway to the home of Her Excellency Nada Hamadeh Moawad, who was cohosting a luncheon in honor of Beirut-born fashion designer Reem Acra.
Inching forward, I scanned the group of women making their way inside the residence. The scene looked familiar and discomforting. Dresses dominated. Heels were high. The makeup was matte. Hair was expertly sprayed into place. MAGA was in the air. It was as if its concentrated form of femininity had pushed official Washington backward in time, as if an entire era of fashion never happened, as if decades of progress in the way women are expected to present themselves had evaporated. As if it was 1982, or even 1952. It was no surprise to hear one guest swoon over a recent encounter with President Donald J. Trump.
The MAGA aesthetic has seeped into all the nooks and crannies of the culture as well as here in diplomatic Washington. You could just as easily find the look on the runway in Ronkonkoma, New York, where, in the fall of 2024, conservative women came to admire red-white-and-blue-bedazzled jewelry and skirts depicting the drafting of the Declaration of Independence at the America First Patriotic Designer Showcase. At the January couture shows in Paris, the look was epitomized by Lauren Sánchez Bezos and her devotion to an hourglass silhouette and toe-crunching heels. In the press pool on Capitol Hill this spring, it was spotted on a reporter for LindellTV—the streaming site launched by Mike “the MyPillow Guy” Lindell. The reporter’s on-the-job look for a contentious interview with Representative Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) included a miniskirt, ankle-wrap heels, a blouse unbuttoned to the base of her sternum, and barrel curls.
MAGA is a style rooted in extremes. It is hostile to nuance and diversity. It views body positivity as a sign of weakness—but regards the president’s puffy, aging body through an exceptionally kind lens. And it believes gender fluidity is something to be stamped out. “As of today, it will henceforth be the official policy of the United States government that there are only two genders: male and female,” Trump said in his second inaugural address.
MAGA is code for hyperfemininity and extreme masculinity. It is women in stiletto heels and brightly colored, figure-hugging dresses—or high-waisted milkmaid ones. It is men in dark suits and red ties with a flag pin permanently affixed to their lapel (or in the case of Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, the American flag lining your suit jackets). MAGA women have long, long curled hair and flapping eyelashes; MAGA men clop about in black Florsheim shoes given to them by a president moonlighting as the nation’s casting director and stylist.
Female MAGA faces are plumped and frozen into a lineless matte mask of misogynistic complicity. Male MAGA bodies are perma-flexed in a posture of overcompensation and possibly aided by testosterone injections.
The goal here is to keep people in their place, to keep them tethered to gender stereotypes, traditions, and a narrow version of history. It is an organizing principle, a way of placating those who might be uncomfortable with changing mores and shifting power structures or who are confused—or simply annoyed—by what is now acceptable behavior and what is harassment. If you are a MAGA believer, the aesthetic offers reassuring cultural guardrails. If you are a nonbeliever, the aesthetic is akin to an electrified fence sorting, separating, and punishing those who won’t fall in line.
MAGA exploits and exaggerates the dominant aesthetics of Washington in the years leading up to the current millennium. That Washington—with all its officiousness—was stuffy and predictable. Men sat at the top of the power pyramid, setting both policy and convention. It wasn’t until 1993 that women even started wearing pants on the Senate floor, and it wasn’t until 2017 that women in the House of Representatives were allowed to bare their arms. Women were made to feel that their bodies were somehow offensive, distracting, or inconvenient. Fashion rules provided order; they helped to maintain the status quo. Men, despite their dominance, didn’t fare much better. Their job was to appear sturdy, brawny, and bland.
On Capitol Hill—and in Georgetown, its indomitable satellite—attire was a formulaic blend of achingly conservative silhouettes (think St. John Knits) and objectifying norms. Women wore luncheon suits, pantyhose, and high heels; they maintained full-face makeup, fresh blowouts, and salon sets. Men’s style was rigorously prescribed too. They wore Brooks Brothers suits, and those suits were navy or charcoal or black. President Ronald Reagan dared wear brown suits, and he was declared fashion-forward. The suits weren’t cut to heighten a man’s physique but rather to comfortably camouflage it. A few men dabbled in bespoke, but it was hard to tell. They managed to make the most elite suiting look proletarian.
MAGA style has taken these familiar Washington constructs and added an element of performative pageant culture and tradwife religiosity—denoted by prominent displays of Christian crosses. It mixes in aspects of toxic masculinity. And it wraps the entire cartoonish concoction in the high gloss of designer labels.
The glamour girls of beauty pageants of yore conflated prettiness with patriotism. Femininity was measured by how well one could traverse a stage in heels and a one-piece, and the ultimate dream was a diamanté tiara. MAGA links to tradwives who use modern-day social media to spread their olden-days gospel of homemade cheese, prairie dresses, and birthing abundant children while their manly men are out doing manly things. It uses the language of fashion-magazine spreads in which even the most mundane objects and activities are presented with a sense of indulgence and aspiration. While these America First adherents preach populism, their closets are full of Dolce & Gabbana, Christian Louboutin, Dior, and plenty of other boldface European names.
All of this spins out from the White House in a series of concentric circles. First lady Melania Trump sits at the center: her MAGA highness. She is the MAGA woman all others emulate. (The president is the man they all aim to please.) She maintains perfect posture atop her perilous Louboutin heels. Her eye makeup is smoky. The clothes are body-conscious—with the occasional nod to a floppy tradwife sleeve. Her smile is astutely attuned to the location of photographers. Her resting face is one of aggrievement. Mrs. Trump is the template for an aesthetic that has grown to be comical and terrifying, flattening and enraging, old-fashioned and foreboding.
Hervé Pierre is the man who has helped shape her public image. He was also the only male guest I spotted at that luncheon—and I’m pretty sure he was the only one wearing sneakers. He’d paired them with a white suit to which he’d affixed a little daisy to his lapel.
If you happened to see Melania, the cinematic ode to the first lady over which she had editorial control, you would have seen Pierre, who was prominently featured. In his most memorable scene, he ventures into the design weeds with Mrs. Trump as they discuss how many millimeters of her white collar should peek from the neckline of the Adam Lippes–designed coat she plans to wear to her husband’s second swearing-in. Audiences learn Mrs. Trump considers every detail of her clothes not because she aims to lift up a particular design house or draw attention to a particular initiative, but because she cares deeply about her appearance. A good-looking first lady is a great first lady. In the MAGA-verse, style is substance. It’s competence. It’s policy. See: Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. riding a stationary bicycle barefoot, shirtless, and wearing jeans, inside a sauna with Kid Rock.
It only makes sense that this administration would complain about news photos it doesn’t believe are flattering enough of their subjects. Officials have expressed enough displeasure with certain photos that they’ve been deleted from a wire service. They’ve banished offending photographers from Pentagon briefings because their pictures of Hegseth depicted him as human and not a Marvel character. Optics are a measure of success. If it looks good, then it is good.
With its gendered stereotypes and racialized strictures, the image promoted by this administration and its loyalists is sending us spiraling back to a time when attractiveness, and by default worth, was measured in the narrowest, whitest terms. It’s an exaggerated version of nostalgia and respectability.
The aesthetic hearkens to a time before transgender rights were part of the political conversation and before same-sex marriage was legalized across the United States. The country had not elected a Black president or even envisioned a Black first lady. The CROWN Act had not been adopted at the state level nor introduced at the federal one. A historic wave of women had not yet been elected to Congress.
It’s a perversion of the past, a form of drag born of longing, disaffection, upheaval, and anger over what democracy has wrought.
Pierre, who is French, has been in Mrs. Trump’s orbit since 2016. He is funny and blunt and in case anyone was wondering, he knows that some people are appalled every time they lay eyes on the president and first lady. He has taken this predisposed outrage as a challenge to do his job well.
Pierre met Mrs. Trump when he collaborated with her on her first inaugural gown. Now at the National Museum of American History, the vanilla silk crepe dress, with its single waterfall ruffle and narrow claret ribbon at the waist, hinted at old-world craft and restraint. It had an air of lightness too. It was feminine and a bit sexy thanks to its slit skirt.
Unlike Sarah Phillips and Michael Faircloth, designers who created dresses for, respectively, Hillary Clinton and Laura Bush and had connections to the cities the first ladies called home, Pierre did not have a long-standing relationship with Mrs. Trump. Pierre is also not the sort of designer whose biography builds a narrative of youthful entrepreneurship into the work, as Jason Wu’s did when he created a gown for Michelle Obama. For Pierre, a dress is simply a dress—expertly fitted, well-made, and appropriately formal or informal depending upon the occasion.
Pierre’s work and his eye make plain that no garment, no singular cut or color or embellishment, is distinctly MAGA. It’s the combination of a multitude of elements. It’s the way in which MAGA fills a void with a story, the way fashion is used as a weapon to belittle and divide and prioritize. This is a first lady, after all, who once departed the White House en route to a detention center for migrant children wearing a jacket that read, “I REALLY DON’T CARE, DO U?” She is a representative of an administration that has been at war with inclusivity, immigration, and nonwhite history. When espoused by Mrs. Trump, Pierre’s devotion to old-world craft reads as a rebuke to new-world diversity. Formality has become an expression of cold callousness. For every designer—Lippes, Stefano Gabbana, Domenico Dolce—who happily and intentionally drapes their clothes on Mrs. Trump’s back, one wonders: Do you care?
Over the years, the movement has taken banal expressions of sex appeal or professionalism—Chiara Boni sheaths, Tuckernuck dresses, and Florsheim shoes—and turned them into curdled messages about gender, sexuality, and power. MAGA understands fashion. Not in the esoteric way that speaks to intellectuals and insiders. Not as an act of fabulousness. Or even as a matter of individual identity. No need to get bogged down in questions about provenance, artfulness, long-form storytelling, or even metaphors. MAGA keeps things simple in a complicated and confusing world. Girls wear pink. Boys wear blue. Everything else is noise.
This administration understands that the electorate to whom they’re appealing is not reading the fine print. We live in a visual culture where we make instant decisions about people in a single glance, whether it’s Trayvon Martin, the Black kid in a hoodie carrying a bag of Skittles who was killed because he looked suspicious, or Kyle Rittenhouse, the white kid wearing a backward baseball cap and toting a semiautomatic weapon who killed two unarmed people but was found not guilty by a jury. People see what they expect to see, what they need to see, in order to make sense of their world.
Hegseth obsesses over the physique of service members—or “warriors,” as he prefers to call them—suggesting that a soldier’s bravery and integrity are directly related to the size of his waist and the country’s dignity is measured by six-packs. He has transformed these men—and a dwindling number of women—into models for what he calls the Department of War. Their job is to strut and flex on the world stage. For Hegseth, nine tenths of victory is looking the part.
With his slicked-back hair and suit jackets cut so that his biceps bulge through the sleeves, Hegseth moves through his days like a comic book superhero, seemingly on the verge of popping his buttons at the first sign of threat or the first test of his authority. His rage stands as a measure of machismo, as if civility is for wimps. What does competence look like through his lens? It’s not a brown-skinned woman hunched over a computer keyboard. It’s a square-jawed warrior with a V-shaped physique looking like Captain America.
What does a woman who is deserving of the country’s sympathy and respect look like? She does not look like Becca Good, whose partner, Renee Good, was shot and killed by ICE agents in Minneapolis. Federal officials initiated an investigation of Becca Good.
For this set, a woman deserving of empathy looks like Erika Kirk. I was struck by the sight of Kirk, in the aftermath of her husband Charlie’s killing, leading a conversation with Nicki Minaj at the Turning Point USA conference. The rapper looked as though she were headed to church, whereas Kirk could have been headed to the front row of a fashion show. The former beauty queen with her blond Rapunzel locks was onstage wearing a bronze satin blouse and flowing white trousers. Pious femininity was being acted out with costumes, makeup, and abundant use of amen.
The women exalted in these spaces put their face on in the morning—as a woman from the 1950s might say. They slide into heels. They perform (white) femaleness for an audience that wants to be reassured that the social hierarchy as they’ve long defined it hasn’t been upset.
MAGA style is a tool for sorting us into categories. Those who deserve empathy versus those who should be investigated. Those who are heroic versus those who are expendable.
The Trump world has grabbed onto a part of the culture that was once the purview of women, queer folks, Black and brown people, artsy intellectuals, and creative iconoclasts. Fashion was a safe haven with its own special language—a place that had thankfully moved beyond bling, so-called nude heels that came in a single shade of beige, and the flimflammery of power dressing. It had become wondrously varied so that it was almost by default an expression of individuality.
MAGA has helped itself to the power of fashion and used it to realize a distorted version of a world from two generations ago, before progress was made not just on the runways but throughout American culture. Instead of using fashion to make folks feel more beautiful, more seen, or more empowered, MAGA is making us all meaner. Less enlightened. And a whole lot uglier.
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