Headline: AlterNet, 5/30/2025
Ailia Zehra reports:
If fashion serves as a form of expression, and politics is deeply rooted in messaging, then the emergence of a distinct "MAGA look" during Trump’s second term is a cultural shift worth paying attention to, the piece argues.
Vanessa Friedman, The Times’s fashion critic, weighed in on the MAGA world's style and fashion.
When asked by reporter Jess Bidgood what the "key elements of MAGA beauty" are, she said it "encompasses Mar-a-Lago face and conservative girl makeup — plays up classically feminine features to an almost cartoonish degree, thus underscoring a retrograde gendered paradigm."
"Think long, blow-dried, bouncy Breck girl hair; false eyelashes and lots of mascara; plumped lips; and, often, filler in the cheeks. Fashion is there to essentially reinforce that proposition. Hence the figure-hugging sheath dress and high heels," she added.
Related reading:
Dame, 2/19/2025
Noah Berlatsky reports:
Since The Stepford Wives was first shown on movie screens 50 years ago, its title has become shorthand for women in thrall to a throwback domesticized femininity. The film’s warning about retrograde gender roles, though, is framed in a plot which expresses anxieties about a future of dehumanization and automation.
The movie continues to resonate because it looks backwards and forwards at once, showing how—for women, especially—the future can spiral in an ever-tightening, ever-worsening circle of oppression. Which is why, in an era of techbro wealth, abortion rights rollback, and AI, The Stepford Wives feels even more prescient than it did when it came out in 1975.
Directed by Bryan Forbes and based on Ira Levin’s 1972 switchblade puzzle-box of a novel, The Stepford Wives begins as budding photographer Joanna Eberhart (Katharine Ross), her lawyer husband Walter (Peter Masterton), and their kids move out of Manhattan to a sprawling house in the suburbs of Stepford.
Walter fits in quickly, hanging out at the local men’s club and enjoying the space. Joanna, on the other hand, is put off by the men’s club, and especially by her women neighbors, who all seem obsessed with their husbands, demure sex, and cleaning their homes, not necessarily in that order.
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"Welcome to The Stepford Wives” (2025). Creating sons but no daughters. (4/24/2025)
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