President George W. Bush brought western clothes with him to the White House – costumes with cowboy boots, large decorative belt loops, cowboy hats. President Barack Obama inaugurated a thinner combination era, while First Lady Michelle Obama helped trigger a renaissance of American design.
Presidential administrations are always delivered with an attached aesthetic. What strikes President Donald Trump is how many others in his orbit – and even his basic supporters – adopted the look of his administration, who Today, explainedGabrielle Berbey told me that “mascarades as recalling older standards of beauty, masculinity and femininity, but in fact represents a whole new era of extravail.”
This Maga aesthetic talks about something bigger about political philosophy and political objectives in Trump 2.0. It was the case in the first Trump administrationAlso. To understand exactly what something is, I spoke with Berbey, which recently produced an episode of Today, explained Podcast all on Maga beauty standards. Our conversation, edited for length and clarity, is below.
Tell me about your reports on Maga aesthetics. When I hear this sentence, a specific image comes to mind.
What is the look that comes to your mind?
It is very radically gender. For men, either shaved completely clean or bearded, nothing between the two; With closed hair on the sides, but long on top. Voluminous construction, as you have been Go to the gymnasium. A short -sleeved shirt – perhaps in technical fabric – associated with jeans or chinos and a kind of boots, perhaps combat boots.
Combat boots too? Are these Maga now?
Haha, yes, I feel like I have seen this a lot. And for the ladies, I would say that long and wavy braids, very full lips, sheath dresses that are adjusted, but professional and very defined eyebrows.
The hair is definitely bouncing. What you describe is really what we wanted to watch in our episode. There is a very visible, artificial and confusing look that many people on Trump’s immediate orbit seem to have.
By reporting our show, we focused on two different looks that talk about the same phenomenon.
There is a particular makeup style that we see that seems to be favored by women on Fox News and women in Trump’s orbit. It includes some of the things you have mentioned: block eyebrows that seem very defined, daring eyeliner, etc.
Beyond makeup, however, there are people – women and men, but especially women – who seem to have undergone very visible plastic surgery.
We see a very obvious level of alteration of the face which is different from the type of plastic surgery that we even saw a few years ago, when people took great difficulty in giving the impression that they had not done a job.
To be clear, no one at Trump Orbit came out and said they had been undergoing plastic surgery. Among the people, often indicated as examples of this facial aesthetic – people like Kristi Noem, Laura Looper, Lara Trump, Kimberly Guilfoyle, Matt Gaetz, etc. – Only Noem admitted to any job, and only at dental work.
We talked to a journalist by Mother Jones, Inae ohWho examined this a lot and was really seated in the question of the question: why do we see what seems to be really dramatic plastic surgery around Trump? And she explored the question of whether the proximity of power – and specifically to Trump – is based on a very specific look.
Which reminds me of a sentence that we have Often heard from Trump Over the years – that a candidate or a politician he favors has been straight out of “central molding. “”
Yes, this sentence is a useful reminder that Trump comes from a world of reality TV, and is also someone who is quite obsessed with the beauty notch – it was literally his business for a while – And is not afraid to say that.
Part of what we see is that the people of his circle looked like stars of reality TV, in a way that looks almost like a uniform-that some on the left call the face of Mar-A-Lago. Maintaining a certain look seems to be an important part of Trump’s entrance.
Does this look tell us something else about Trump or his administration?
Something that Aee emphasizes is that these looks seem to be linked to politics. You have extreme looks associated with extreme policies. I think Kristi Noem is doing Glam expulsion in his DHS videos.
These extreme looks are a reminder to another era of plastic surgery. These extreme policies are a reminder of a different period in the United States. There is a reversion of politics and aesthetics.
You used the word “extreme” there. Is there an effort to be extreme on all fronts? Is this a way to describe the link between the aesthetics and Trump policy?
I think yes. Something that Aee underlines is that Trump 2.0 is exaggerated both in politics and aesthetics, in a way that Trump 1.0 was not.
From above, as reality TV is deliberately exaggerated, in its efforts to provide maximum entertainment?
TV is really a useful way to think about it, in the sense that it is something, a bit like the aesthetics that we see around these adjacent figures from Trump, which is based on distraction tools. You are caught in glamor and ridiculous, and you do not notice what is really going on (or sometimes how nothing happens).
Inae underlines that when you look at the ridiculousness of a deportation glamor, reality TV DHS videoYou almost forget that there are real people in these videos that are expelled, who have families, because performance and aesthetics are so shocking.
As you said, I thought, it is almost as if Trump’s policies themselves had undergone plastic surgery – they have been given shiny and artificial faces that you wanted to look, which makes reality below.
It’s a very good way to say it. And this is the case to talk about aesthetics and politics as a pair. Because when you just talk about aesthetics, it can start to be very anti-feminist. People should do what they want with their face. But when you associate the brutality of the policies with an increase in the almost brutal face, they feel connected and deserve to be questioning.
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