Fashion is political propaganda. What one hesitates to say aloud – or what may be unspeakable – can still be effectively expressed through sartorial speech.1 The recent US Presidential election, and the cultural reverberations that have since followed, highlighted just how ideologically charged sartorial speech can be. Symbols such as the iconic red MAGA hat functioned as a way to construct a narrative of American exceptionalism that had been lost somewhere along the way as, in a post-COVID world, the nation’s citizens became skeptical of institutions, rejected globalisation, and embraced isolationism.2 The hat gives a uniformed look to the Republican party, even as ideological differences persist among its adherents, as evidenced by responses to the recent attacks on Iran’s nuclear facilities.3 Although Democrats do not use a single emblem to serve as a metonym for their party, they also utilise clothing as sartorial speech, whether as a language of resistance or a means to celebrate multiculturalism and diverse subjectivities among their ranks. In the realm of political fashion, signifiers often resist a fixed meaning, and the media, which usually skews left, plays a crucial role in shaping it, either amplifying or warping the message intended by the wearer.4
The philosopher Jean-François Lyotard, in his The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, wrote about the decline of metanarratives in the postmodern age, or the overarching stories used by cultures, peoples, and societies to craft and maintain an identity.5 These stories provide a foundational structure, often offering a sense of continuity and coherence through a shared origin story. Much has been written about the symbolism behind the MAGA hat and the ways in which it evokes a memory – whether real or imagined – of an idyllic and uncomplicated past.6 In the context of the recent election, uncomplicated often meant a time when what made a man a man and a woman a woman was not up for debate and there was not yet an influx of immigrants from south of the border, making the boundaries of the American identity feel safely fixed.
It is precisely this sense of stability that a metanarrative seeks to reassert, and it is not merely symbolic. Among Trump’s earliest actions was to codify a biologically essentialist view of gender, limiting identity to male and female only. In this sense, the hat implies the existence of an essentialist understanding of America, and a promise to return to it. The baseball cap is simultaneously both tribal and democratic: it denotes affiliation with a specific subset yet cuts across all classes. In the case of the MAGA hat, it is worn by the party leader himself, signalling that he is not exceptional but on par with the populace. He may preside over this metanarrative but he looks less like a ruler and more like a reflection of the people.
Opponents of Trump frequently repurpose the MAGA hat and its message as a sign of resistance – a trend that has spread worldwide. Demonstrators in Greenland donned ‘Make America Go Away’ hats during Vice President J.D. Vance’s controversial visit, in response to Trump’s fervent interest in acquiring their country. Similarly, Doug Ford, the premier of Canada, wore a blue ‘Canada is Not for Sale’ hat at a meeting with Justin Trudeau after Trump repeatedly floated the idea of making Canada America’s fifty-first state. As biting as the altered messages may be, however, the final products are but a sartorial echo of the original and are thus limited in impact. Furthermore, these protest slogans make explicit references to MAGA, inevitably redirecting the audience’s attention back to it and ensuring its symbolic power remains.
A large part of the appeal of the MAGA slogan lies in its inherent subjectivity; the term great is sufficiently capacious and vague enough to accommodate a number of interpretations. As such, MAGA merchandise operates as an empty signifier, the malleability of which is especially useful in a climate where both the object and its wearer may face derision. One such reinterpretation comes from young conservative women who collectively want to Make America Hot Again. The slogan – and its accompanying pink hat – is the invention of the women behind The Conservatour, a lifestyle website dedicated to what is framed as the now counter-cultural act of expressing ‘America’s quintessential style and traditions.’7 Similar to the symbolic ideology behind the MAGA hat, the website leverages nostalgia as a branding tactic, ranging from frequent references to Jacqueline Kennedy’s style to fashion inspired by the small-town charm of a vintage ice cream shop. The latter is meant to evoke easier times, before the rapid pace of progressive change rendered the world unrecognisable to some.
The website is sleek and content-rich; visiting it simulates the excitement of opening a glossy magazine. Its aesthetic blends Americana with high fashion, making the revivalist domestic trend sexy and patriotism alluring, all while pushing back against the idea that femininity must be frumpy to be taken seriously. A selection on offer, for example, is a sweater featuring a black and white image of Ronald Reagan – America’s quintessential Republican icon – posed on horseback. It evokes a rugged, masculine ideal, which conjures the mythology of the Wild West, a crucial part of the American origin story. In this way, both The Conservatour and the MAGA hat act as proponents of cultural hegemony whereby cultural dominance is asserted not through politics but aesthetics. Political ideology is encoded in aesthetic terms, and a right-wing worldview becomes normalised through the deliberate molding of what is attractive and aspirational. For these young women, beauty is positioned as a universal ideal, one that fits neatly into the metanarrative of American exceptionalism.
This ideology has found further expression in the rise of the ‘tradwife,’ or traditional housewife, women happy to reclaim the role of the 1950s homemaker. Reframing fulfilment as located within the domestic sphere signals how modern conservative women are grappling with feminism’s critiques of the same, and it is accompanied by a shift in style. On TikTok, the tradwife phenomenon is heavily aestheticised: buxom beauties in flowery, flowy dresses carry wicker baskets overflowing with the day’s pick of fresh berries. The image is a tonic to a topsy-turvy world, and it is also lucrative. Women have monetised the movement by becoming influencers, a key difference between them and their mid-century counterparts.
Why, then, do so many liberals take issue with it? If feminism champions the right to choose, perhaps it is the clothes that unsettle more so than the choice itself. There seems to be suspicion when motherhood does not come with a sacrifice in style and when the domestic does not resemble drudgery. The flowing garments of the tradwives resist the feminist imperative to work outside of the home. Where pants once signalled entry into the workforce for reasons of safety and integration, wearing such dresses, in this context, resists burnout culture and is a radical reclamation of a feminine site of power. The left-wing media, however, have portrayed tradwives as traitors to the feminist feat of liberating women from the homestead. Its critics highlight the movement’s proximity to far-right ideologies, such as ‘replacement theory’ and anti LGBTQ+ sentiment, though only a small fringe hold these views within a much larger cultural current.8
Media representations of traditionalism demonstrate how bias influences public discourse, often intensifying already-present anxieties. For example, on a day when the White House hosted a group of right-wing podcasters, Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt posted a video of herself in an unusually austere dress, featuring buttons to the neck and a hem that reached to the shins. Comparisons to the red-robed women of the novel The Handmaid’s Tale – a dystopian novel in which women are forced to reproduce – were immediately drawn, and those on the left read the outfit as a harbinger of the repressive social order to come. This alarmist response spoke to larger concerns sparked by recent legislative changes. Since the 2022 overturning of Roe v. Wade, forty-one states have enacted abortion bans, stoking fears that women’s rights are being stripped at an unprecedented rate.9 Yet for conservatives, these fears overlook what they perceive as the Trump administration’s pro-woman agenda: Trump has proposed $5,000 baby bonuses to mothers after the delivery of a child and is in support of IVF, unlike many within his party.10
Whereas Leavitt’s sartorial speech is interpreted as part of a larger metanarrative advocating a return to classic American values, the fashion choices of Democrats in power engage more localised narratives – what Lyotard refers to as ‘petits récits,’ or small stories – which change how their style is perceived.11 For example, the fashion of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC), Kamala Harris, Michelle Obama, and Huma Abedin is interpreted through the intersecting lens of race and gender. At her 2019 swearing-in ceremony, AOC wore gold hoops and red lipstick, a nod to her Latina heritage and also to Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor, who refused to wear neutral nail polish to her confirmation. As AOC is one of the youngest Latinas ever elected to Congress and Sotomayor the first Hispanic to serve on the Supreme Court, both women asserted there was room for more than one national narrative in the corridors of the US government.
At times, this message has been more discreet, delivered through the choice of a designer rather than overt signifiers. Michelle Obama, AOC, and Kamala Harris have all worn pieces by the Black designer Sergio Hudson, whose silhouettes pay homage to traditional American tailoring and luxury.12 It is the bodies that inhabit these clothes, however, that shift their meaning, recasting what is classically American as cultural self-determination. Occasionally, the designer takes a bold approach, such as is the case with Prabal Gurung. In 2017, with Huma Abedin front row, Gurung sent models down the runway in T-shirts that read ‘This is What a Feminist Looks Like.’ The irony lay in the reminder that feminists have no signature style – they may be the ‘everyday woman’ all around us – even as he momentarily assigned them one. His 2019 collection posed the pressing question, ‘Who Gets to be American?’ It demonstrated the absence of a single answer by having models of multiple sizes and ethnicities wear traditional American symbols. His clothes address the numerous narrative threads that weave their way through American identity and complicate exclusionary perspectives perpetuated by a singular cultural metanarrative.
While designers like Gurung seek to broaden the visual language of American identity, conservative media often fixates on its more extreme expressions, drawing attention to images and videos of certain liberals as proof of the spectacle that is identity politics.13 During the election, right-wing social media feeds and talk shows were flooded with videos of people – often with coloured hair and multiple piercings – reciting a litany of pronouns and, at times, identifying as animals. It was ripe material for Republican outrage and used as evidence that, in a progressive world, cultural norms would become further unmoored. These widely circulated videos, which unsettled not only conservatives but also centrist voters, soon came to symbolise the Democratic party overall. In this narrative, Democrats are accused of fetishising identity so much so that it has splintered into absurd factions, forcing the party to perform a confusing dance in which it tries to reconcile seemingly conflicting causes. Comedian Bill Mahr, for instance, recently denounced the Queers for Palestine movement, viewing it as a contradictory alliance.14
Dressing in politics is never a neutral act – intent is ascribed the very moment an outfit is worn. Clothes, however, may mis-signal or resist straightforward interpretation, which is why the same outfit may generate multiple translations. Filtered through the media, as political fashion so often is, these messages are usually preemptively decoded for audiences, and often with bias. Clothes are powerful enough to construct a national identity or to contest its very foundations. Lying as it does so close to the skin, it is but another layer of who we are. Perhaps then, what we see are two parties using fashion to shape visions of the America they want to see.
Tiffany Olgun is a New Yorker with a PhD in Charles Dickens and dandyism from Royal Holloway in London.
Domna C. Stanton, in her The Aristocrat as Art, writes that ‘Virtually all societies possess languages of dress and decoration, small or larger sets of discrete signs that emit differing, even contradictory meanings. The relation between the signifiers … and their signified … although ostensibly arbitrary when viewed from an aprioristic perspective, will appear less so a posteriori once it has been successfully rationalised and legitimised by the contextual culture.’ It is this that she refers to as ‘sartorial speech.’ ↩
https://www.pew.org/en/trend/archive/fall-2024/americans-deepening-mistrust-of-institutions ↩
https://www.politifact.com/article/2022/sep/21/what-maga-republican/; https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jun/17/republican-hawks-vs-maga-isolationists-the-internal-war-that-could-decide-trumps-iran-response ↩
For reading on left-wing media bias, see: https://www.newyorker.com/news/fault-lines/how-biased-is-the-media-really; https://www.thefp.com/p/npr-editor-how-npr-lost-americas-trust ↩
Lyotard writes, “The breaking up of the grand Narratives … leads to what some authors analyse in terms of the dissolution of the social bond and the disintegration of social aggregates … Nothing of this kind is happening. ↩
It is to be noted that most articles on the MAGA hat are from liberal news sources: https://www.npr.org/2019/01/27/689191278/the-symbol-of-the-maga-hat; https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/the-maga-hat-is-not-a-statement-of-policy-its-an-inflammatory-declaration-of-identity/2019/01/23/9fe84bc0-1f39-11e9-8e21-59a09ff1e2a1_story.html; https://www.gq.com/story/maga-hat-march-for-life; https://www.vanityfair.com/style/story/trump-2028-hats-constitution?srsltid=AfmBOop4OJnAClVhXEdPEXd2LXaLKtcTjGt8o7C-A-AvZKiYCsl3syXe ↩
https://www.theconservateur.com/about; for additional reading about young conservative women: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/23/style/trump-maga-women.html ↩
https://www.cnn.com/2022/12/27/us/tradwife-1950s-nostalgia-tiktok-cec ↩
https://www.guttmacher.org/state-policy/explore/state-policies-abortion-bans ↩
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/21/us/politics/trump-birthrate-proposals.html ↩
Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, 1979, p.60 ↩
Both Michelle Obama and Kamala Harris wore Sergio Hudson on the inauguration day of former president Joe Biden in 2021. ↩
For more on how identity politics have hurt the Democratic party at the polls and how they are struggling to redefine their party: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/09/opinion/democrats-identity-politics.html; https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/08/us/politics/democrats-dei-trump.html;
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/03/02/third-way-patriotism-democrats-campaign-00206890; https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/12/democrats-election-loss-identity/680993/ ↩https://variety.com/2024/tv/news/bill-maher-chappell-roan-thrown-off-roof-gaza-1236176147/ ↩