Surface Tension: which image captures the current cultural mood? In a new column for AnOthermag.com, writer and Nymphet Alumni podcast host Biz Sherbert takes an image – from art, the internet, or her camera roll – and probes beyond its surface, exploring what it says about our current cultural and political moment.
A beautiful girl goes to a party and has her photo taken. That photo ends up on the cover of a magazine. The beautiful girl becomes a symbol of the times, of what people want (her) and don’t want (women who don’t look like her). A story like this one has been repeated throughout history. There is always a woman, singular or composite, who has served as a model for how culture is changing. And right now, she’s an apple-cheeked sorority girl from Mountain Brook, Alabama.
After appearing on the cover of New York Magazine in January, smiling at the centre of a Trump inauguration ball, Anna Claire Howland became the radiant new face of conservatism. Specifically, the kind of conservatism the cover story is about, practised by an increasingly visible cohort of young, photogenic Republicans more yuppie with a dinner reservation than Trumpie with a Twitter habit.
In fact, Howland is hardly the mainstream image of the contemporary right-wing woman. That woman has bleached-blonde hair and a heavy face of matte make-up (‘conservative girl make-up’ is so codified that it’s recently become the target of a mocking TikTok trend). Howland wears her light brown hair, seemingly the colour God gave her, in a cropped cut paired with healthy, natural-looking make-up – a look singlehandedly popularised by Hailey Bieber.
As for the rest, she’s sheathed in a black slip dress with a plunge scalloped neckline in contrasting white lace. The cut shows off her toned arms and decolletage. It’s black tie for college girls – long and dramatic enough to be considered formal, but sexy and a little casual from the lace and spaghetti straps. It’s not a look associated with conservative womenswear, which seems to only ever be represented at two poles – the tight, structured work dresses and blazers of Fox News correspondents and the shill-y milkmaid dresses of the younger trad crowd online.
These differences are literally superficial, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t taken seriously. One take with over a million views suggests that conservative girl make-up “signals conservative, often Christian, traditionalist [values],” while clean girl make-up, the moniker for the less-is-more look, “signals liberal urban elite [values]” (illustrated by a fresh-faced Bieber). Howland complicates this cultural math. She is a clean girl with conservative values.
This is not surprising if you’ve looked at sorority girls recently. Elements of prep and pageant that were once their signifiers, and therefore of beliefs assumed to be right of centre, are still somewhat present. But things have changed. They follow trends, maybe the same ones you do, and shop online, maybe at the same stores as you. Last fall, at a tailgate party at a leafy, expensive school similar to Southern Methodist University, where Howland is a student, I saw sorority sisters sipping out of plastic cups dressed like they were out for martinis in Lower Manhattan, in coquettish Mary-Janes (maybe a season or two too late) and maxi skirts with boho hardware. One Twitter commenter tried to cool the hot-blooded hysteria around Howland’s looks by saying that, actually, she looks like every girl in the West Village.
But most, on the right anyway, took her beauty as a sign of good to come. If not exactly a trophy of the war they felt they’d just won, then proof that their side was fighting for the right things, things you can tell have value just by looking at them. It’s an idea that’s resurfaced across party lines recently, always there but briefly buried by the liberal imperative to shirk beauty standards – that by-the-book hotness is the most powerful “signifier of wealth, health and virtue,” as Michelle Santiago Cortés writes in a newsletter on the subject. The beauty panic around Howland was mined for less grand insights about the true rules of attraction too, with her full cheeks posited as evidence that Hollywood’s war on buccal fat is biologically misguided, ie, men don’t actually like it.
The truth is that Howland would be considered good-looking under any president. She’s young, thin and has a best-case-scenario American face. But she’s not the only homegrown beauty to captivate the public as of late; TikToker-turned-pop-star Addison Rae was Rolling Stone’s February cover girl, styled like Madonna in Baker-Miller pink under the headline How The Democrats Blew It. Released a few days before New York’s The Cruel Kids’ Table issue featuring Howland, the covers read like twin flames.
Like Howland, Rae is a girl from the South with a million-dollar smile and preternatural confidence. When she first started dancing on TikTok as a student at Louisiana State University during the final year of Trump’s first term, her blonde highlights and clumpy mascara were a stone’s throw away from conservative girl make-up. But she’s since become a symbol of the American dream for the TikTok generation, making it big on social media before reinventing herself as a serious artist whose art is in large part her life, made visible through how she posts and what she wears to pilates class. The effect of this transformation cannot be understated. Rae has pop culture wrapped around her finger, with industry voices and fans alike clambering to say they spotted her brilliance when she was still a twangy diamond in the rough.
In the music video for her latest single High Fashion, Rae gyrates through sifts of powdered sugar while wearing curled pigtails, sheer pedal pushers and ruby-red pumps that bring to mind Judy Garland in The Wizard of Oz. This is what makes Rae, her brand and the beauty that makes it all work, so addictive – she looks like America’s sweetheart but does it all a little dirty, like an Alpha Phi gone art.
Rae dropped out of LSU to pursue social media about a year before Livvy Dunne began her freshman year there. Dunne might be the most famous sex symbol you’ve never heard of: a fifth-year college gymnast with big brown eyes, over 12 million followers and at least as many young men whose brains would melt if they were to receive a single message from her on Snapchat. Dunne, who is dating Major League baseball star Paul Skenes, is that most democratic of beauty: a flexible college blonde whose hotness needs no explanation. Her popularity with men is so great that it produced a market for lookalikes who in turn have grown their own huge, thirsty followings.
I bring up Dunne to illustrate the mass appeal of this kind of beauty. It’s not wrong to find someone like her hot, even if it feels a little low-brow. Statistically, it’s totally normal. And it’s clear that it’s what people across the spectrum want – gay guys in Bushwick just needed a stylist to put Rae in some weird clothes to help get them there.
This is not to say that the physical ideal of this political era will be limited to smiley, straightforward beauty of varying degrees of refinement. But it’s been made clear, through the popularity of those smiley, maybe-not-so straightforward beauties, that in a time where looking better is privileged above all else, beauty isn’t so partisan anymore. The new face of the right doesn’t have a crunchy blonde blowout. She has the same trendy haircut as a girl who retweeted ‘Kamala is brat’ last summer, and probably a pretty similar skincare routine too. Beauty may be a battleground, but right now we’re all fighting for the same thing.
