Did trends like quiet luxury predict the rise of conservative politics?

“A lot of it is about conformity,” she insists, fleshing out her thesis. “There is a value system associated with that aesthetic. We are returning to that aesthetic because we have returned to that value system.”

Fashion and beauty trends have long been considered indicators of society’s values, with conventional beauty trends like the kind we’re seeing — quiet luxury, top-to-toe beige, natural highlights — traditionally acting as key components for the success of the conservative or, in some cases, the far-right.

“The rise of beauty manuals, or in our case, social media tutorials, typically goes hand in hand with economic downturns,” beauty historian Laura Fitzachary says.

“The Ugly Girl Papers [a book of excerpts from Harper’s Bazaar] were sold amidst the Panic of 1873 to teach women how to be beautiful because beauty was goodness and beauty was ideal. Today, with the rise of the far right, we’re spotting the patterns we’ve noticed for decades; a return to trad-wife culture, tattoo removal, filler dissolving and general conformity — these are practices people lean towards in times of struggle.”

The fetishisation of unifying how one looks with morality traces as far back as Ancient Greece, where the concept of Kalokagathia — an integration of the ethical and the aesthetic — was discussed by Aristotle. This concept has been played out at large ever since; protagonists are slim, clear-skinned, mainly white and symmetrical, while antagonists are regularly signposted by larger bodies, blemishes, non-white skin tones, and misshapen faces. Historically, this concept draws parallels to fascism and Nazism, with some claiming these parallels run along the central tenets of the wellness industry; regimes posing as regimens. (So much so, British journalist James Bell hailed it the ‘wellness-to-fascism pipeline’.)

The link between how one presents oneself and how one votes is perhaps most effectively shown in Fox News anchors, a slew of right-wing, Trumpian women who distil their politics into one, ultra-feminine ideal; girlishly blonde hair, slim silhouettes and Disney-fied faces.

In a 2017 Hadley Freeman article in the Guardian discussing this, Freeman wrote that the “uniformity of this style suggests a political statement … Theirs is a look that defiantly embraces the most conservative notions of femininity … And firmly rejects any idea of modernity, let alone feminism.” 

From this conservative perspective, a woman’s value is biologically and intrinsically tied to male desire. Beauty, then — and all of its products and treatments — becomes tantamount in times of strife to security and comfort. At the same time, reducing women to their looks eliminates the possibility of them becoming a threat, making it easier to revoke their rights and bodily autonomy. Almost as if to suggest: If they’re constantly distracted by the endless pursuit of self-optimisation, they won’t notice if we regress.

“Generally, we commit to conformity in times of trauma,” Fitzachary says. “In those moments, we’re not really able to play with anything too radical or extreme, so we tend to lean towards what’s gone before; that clone sort of look, which is something a lot of people talk about now; how style is no longer a thing.”

“What we do know is that people will try and fit in, especially if there are strong negative consequences for not fitting in,” Dr Denis O’Hora, director of the MSc in Consumer Psychology at the University of Galway, echoes.

“Sometimes, authorities control dress directly; children wear uniforms in school because, if they don’t, they’ll be sent home — that sort of thing. In authoritarian regimes, social control can also be weaponised, in that people don’t want to attract attention. This bias ramps up when they can’t trust governing forces to treat them fairly.”

While research around fashion, beauty, and how one presents oneself, is a blind spot in social psychology — a lapse many credit with misogyny— Dr O’Hora does suggest that how people dress is likely affected by dominant political forces, “particularly the more authoritarian or controlling the state, the more homogenised people’s dress will be”.

We see this in Arab cultures, he suggests, “where women’s public fashion is strongly controlled”.

“While we don’t have enough data to say anything with confidence concerning whether fashion trends predict or follow political trends, we know that impression formation is an incredibly important concern for most people and dress is easily changed to enhance the impression we make; we ‘dress to impress’. And when people want to demonstrate their alignment with others, you will likely see more conservatism.”

The beauty and wellness industries function partly by solving a “crisis of the imagination,” as Susan Sontag puts it in The Double Standard of Aging; the knowing fear that you will be deemed less beautiful in time, and, from that, consequences might arise. This fear is both realistic and artificially imposed by conspiring industries: as long as women are egregiously objectified, beauty will function as value, and its absence as lack.

As per Naomi Wolf’s The Beauty Myth, beauty is “the last, best belief system that keeps male dominance intact” and “the more rights women achieve, the stricter the rules of beauty get”.

This, one could argue, is the reason for the breakneck pivot we’ve noticed in recent years from expressive beauty and body diversity to the perceived demurity of dissolved filler, low buns, undetectable makeup, trad wife culture, quiet luxury, clean girl aesthetic, girlish blusher, medical weight loss, longer hemlines, coquette aesthetic and cottagecore. (“When the world feels out of control, our appearance is what we tackle first,” Fitachery confirms. “Food, and our access to it, is one of the first to be looked at, which is likely why we’ve seen a massive rise in Ozempic.”)

Today’s beauty climate is set against the backdrop of what some scholars have called a “post-feminist” era, with a strong emphasis on choice feminism. In a 2024 paper, entitled ‘What makes a liberal feminist?,’ liberals report stronger feminist identities than conservatives, which might explain how visible makeup and brightly coloured hair became signifiers of left-wing politics and women’s liberation. 

Conversely, right-wing beauty ideals centre around the attributes associated with whiteness; light skin, narrow noses and blonde hair. (Allegedly, Alfred Hitchcock liked to cast blondes in his films because they made the best victims: “The colour was virgin snow that shows up the bloody footprints.”) Today, Fox News and Donald Trump have politicised blonde hair to mean a hallmark of white privilege. Fun fact, just 2% of the world is naturally blonde — control is paramount.

As Danielle L Vermeer, a stalwart in the secondhand fashion space, suggests in a tweet: ‘fashion is political … milkmaid dresses, cottage-core, long denim skirts, coquette, soft girl, girl math … it’s never just about the clothes’. As a result, women — and particularly, lower-class women — are grappling with a backlash against body autonomy, the cost-of-living crisis, economic mobility, support for working mothers and feminism itself. In turn, they’ve reverted inward to obtain control. This, then, redirects them towards the iconography of an idealised past — leaving them out of the way for the present and future to disclude them.

“It is all-encompassing, because so is the situation they find themselves in,” Fitzachary says. “For those stuck in the box room in their parent’s house, this is the only way they can cope, rebel or self-identify.”

As discussions around beauty as an act of resistance rather than submission dominate Western culture, it feels unsurprising that how we present ourselves has become part of the conversation. “Women’s bodies have always been collateral damage when it comes to politics,” Fitzachary says. “The future for so many seems bleak, and because of that, we’ve noticed people rescinding their individualism, which is likely because they feel they can’t make a difference.”

However, Fitzachary is hopeful.

“It’s been discussed at recent Fashion Weeks, the push and pull between the avant-garde and conservative feminity, so a reaction to individualism could be around the corner. And God, I hope so.”