So You Want to Look Hot?
Amid a political and cultural turn to conservatism, aesthetic striving is one of the last unifiers.
In 2018, Yellowstone — an outrageously popular neo-western soap opera of sorts — premiered on Paramount. When the show first aired, I heard about it through the middle-aged, suburban grapevine. Initially, I didn’t think much of it beyond mainstream entertainment that had very little do with me and my FYP. But by the fifth season, the premiere was met with 17 million viewers and the penultimate episode featured a guest appearance from none other than Deumoix’s favorite rodeo girl, the Princess Of Nazareth herself, Bella Hadid.
Of course, I heard about this immediately. My social media feed was overrun with photos of Hadid in a black push-up bra under a tight white tank, paired with bronze-y makeup and a cowboy hat. (If Ralph Lauren doesn’t yet have plans to exploit this for a campaign, someone please hire me.) Soon, I started to see more posts raving — with what seemed like surprise — about how pretty she looked. I couldn’t have been the only one wondering: Did older conservatives only just find out that Bella Hadid is hot?
Conservatism has been gaining cultural influence for years; country music is topping the charts, trad wife aesthetics have been everywhere since 2020. But this felt like a new level. For years, it’s been a given that there’s a divide between capital-F fashion (usually based in New York or LA) and the mainstream North American culture consumed by folks in the suburbs or exurbs. But Hadid’s brand of “hotness” — white passing, extremely thin, impossibly sexy, and early aughts-esque — was uniting even the most unlikely of demographics: NYC fashion girlies and, for lack of a better identifier, normies who like Kevin Costner.
In the fall of 2024, progressive friends of all genders began expressing a newly unabashed desire to look “hot.” Per usual, for girls, that meant long hair, pilates arms, and yummy skin. The guys were going for Jeremy Allen White in a tank top. Even leftist streamer Hasan Piker was posting before and after pics. Our striving to achieve a certain aesthetic wasn’t new, the difference was that we were no longer ashamed to admit to our desires. Everyone seemed to feel a blend of relief and rebellion in fessing up to their once privately held aspiration to look good. One evening, after coating myself in inordinately priced body oil and upping the limit on my ClassPass subscription, I took to the group chat, asking, “This is all very Trumpian of me, isn’t it?”
None of this was a recession indicator so much as it was an 2024 election indicator. We’re seeing a pervasive, reactionary desire for a return to an American version of hotness that predated the mainstream “body positivity” movement — a fixture of Obama-era #hopecore. As Brock Coylar wrote in New York Magazine, “Conservatism — as a cultural force, not just a political condition — is back in a real way for the first time since the 1980s.”
Of course, when conservatives describe themselves as conservative, they’re not just identifying a certain aesthetic, they mean it literally. There’s a move right now, both in politics and in pop culture, to conserve what the Right imagines to be “truly” American. To make America great again, as it were. In terms of policy, it means they want to roll back abortion rights and get rid of vaccines. In pop culture, it can be as subtle as the proliferation of Frye Campus Boots, or as inelegant and lumbering as Morgan Wallen posting “Get me to God’s country” after co-hosting SNL.
Cultural conservatism’s particular brand of nostalgia carries a racist and anti-immigrant sentiment, as well as a patriarchal and hetero gesture toward an idealized national identity, grounded in a specific set of values. It’s worth noting that much of what the Right wants to "conserve" or "return to" is ahistorical. The idea that a woman’s place is confined to the home, for example, actually wasn’t commonplace until the 19th century, and only then for a wealthy few.
This pastoral tend to the land and home lifestyle that modern conservatives idolize is generally inaccessible to urban 20-somethings, so its aesthetics are often all young conservatives are left with. Not to mention, in the most vain country on earth, optimizing your appearance by any means necessary is one of the more reliable ways to guarantee security, particularly for women. It only makes sense that as young men are increasingly radicalized Right-ward, young women are modifying their appearances to match.
For my friends and I — mostly leftist, college educated women in our twenties living in an American metropolis — the appeal of mainstream hotness has less to do with conservative ideals and more with a sentiment that “nothing matters lol.” As we look around at a landscape in which rights, freedoms, and breathable air seem less and less likely, finding a little pleasure in looking good, something we might actually be materially rewarded for, can be fun. If nothing else, it eases the chafe of day-to-day living.
We aren’t the only ones. Likely inspired by Hadid and others in her cohort, push-up bras spiked in popularity by 400% at the beginning of this year. And in September, Viv Chen wrote about the history of the J.Crew catalogue and how its relaunch “taps into the desire for a world we remember as safe and idealized.” In times of national strife, nostalgia offers us at least the feeling of safety, even if we can’t have the real thing.
The recent collaboration between Bella Hadid and Frankies Bikinis brings it all together. The collection is riddled with red, white, and blue, in addition to eyelet, gingham, and suede. Like Hadid herself, it’s hot California girl meets Southern Belle, yet still cool enough that girls all over Brooklyn will be wearing it — a rare tricoastal triumph. Her boobs are pushed up, in a way they wouldn’t have been a few years back, and her hair is teased to the Almighty. There is no fault to be placed on Hadid for playing in, as many of us do, but she does seem to function as some kind of cultural repository, or maybe just a mirror.
Idk why you said white passing. Bella Hadid is white. Being half Palestinian doesn’t make you not white. There are also white and blonde Palestinians. This is like calling an Italian person white passing lol