Women’s Glossies Go MAGA – Columbia Journalism Review

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Like many younger girls, Alex Clark grew up watching motion pictures about ladies who labored at vogue magazines. Early on, she knew that’s what she needed to do, too. She learn each e book she may discover about working within the business, and wrote a vogue column for her highschool paper. In faculty, she minored in vogue merchandising. Now thirty-two and the host of Culture Apothecary, a conservative wellness podcast, she’s glad she didn’t go down the mainstream media path.

Take Teen Vogue, Clark stated, calling from Scottsdale, Arizona: It “became a Marxist rag.” She continued, “What an absolute disaster that has become.” (Teen Vogue was shut down in November.)

Clark’s first jobs in media included a job as a  site visitors reporter at WDJX in Louisville and cohost of a morning present at 100.9 WNOW (now WHHH) in Indianapolis. She stated she didn’t really feel she could possibly be “openly conservative.” So, in 2019, she left radio to host the Turning Point USA–produced podcast POPlitics. The following yr she began The Spillover, which she rebranded in 2024 as Culture Apothecary, and shifted focus to wellness as a result of she thought that well being subjects would resonate with extra voters forward of the election. 

Clark’s present is in style: It ranks among the many prime ten well being podcasts on Spotify. It is without doubt one of the most seen cultural merchandise in a fast-growing wave of girls’s media that deal with subjects like wellness, popular culture, and vogue from a right-wing perspective, presenting a shiny model of conservatism that reads as each aspirational and accessible. 

When I requested Clark which different girls’s magazines she follows, she stated, “Evie is crushing it.” Evie, based in 2019, is {a magazine} that Brittany Hugoboom, its editor in chief, describes as “classier than Cosmo, sexier than Refinery29, and smarter than Bustle.” Recent articles embrace an essay on why Taylor Swift is dreaming of the “trad wife” life and a listicle on the hazards of contraception. Evie additionally publishes Cosmopolitan-style intercourse ideas which might be largely geared toward married {couples}.

The Conservateur, one other conservative girls’s journal, was based in 2020 by Isabelle Redfield and Jayme Franklin, each of whom labored in Trump’s White House throughout his first administration. (Redfield was an intern; Franklin was director of correspondence after working as coalitions coordinator through the marketing campaign.) The Conservateur is overtly political, protecting subjects resembling Vice President JD Vance’s relationship together with his spouse, Usha, and California’s Proposition 50, a contentious modification that handed final yr. At the identical time, the journal carves out a uniquely Trumpian female aesthetic. “The soft click of heels echoing through the corridors of the West Wing, the confident cut of tailored blazers, and the gleam of stringed pearls,” Bethany Miller writes in a chunk that ran subsequent to a picture of the White House engulfed in a cloud of pink glitter. “These are the sights and sounds of the newly appointed Trump administration.”

“The Conservateur fit a niche that did not exist,” Emma Foley, a content material supervisor on the National Review and a contributor to The Conservateur, instructed me. “Vogue was—and is—left-leaning. It seeks feminism, whether that’s traditional feminism or this more progressive, radical ideology that just doesn’t jibe with how traditional, conservative, and religious women think. And so there was an empty space in the market.”

The followings of Evie and The Conservateur are nonetheless comparatively small in contrast with mainstream vogue magazines like Vogue. On Instagram, Evie and The Conservateur each have over 200 thousand followers. But their audiences are engaged. “POV the streets are clean and the border is secure,” learn the textual content over one current picture on The Conservateur’s account, revealed alongside a caption: “It’s not a fantasy, it’s just Trump’s America.” Below it, customers flooded the feedback part with American flags and prayer palms, flames and smiling crying faces. “Yassss,” one person wrote. 

On tv and on-line video platforms, folks like Candace Owens—who lately created her personal life-style enterprise, Club Candace—and Brett Cooper, the Gen Z Fox News contributor, attempt to enchantment to an identical viewers. Meanwhile, smaller impartial initiatives like Evie Solheim’s Substack The Girl’s Guide, which options interviews with conservative writers that discover “the intersection of culture and politics,” have additionally began to crop up.

While American girls total favored Kamala Harris within the final election, Trump made beneficial properties with the group. Support for the Republican ticket elevated by 6 p.c from 2020 to 2025, in accordance with the Center for American Women and Politics. “I totally attribute that to MAHA,” Clark stated, referring to Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s antiestablishment Make America Healthy Again motion. “I have had thousands of DMs of women saying ‘I never would have voted for Trump if it wasn’t for the MAHA movement and him joining forces with Bobby Kennedy.’ I’ve had women come up to me at events and say, ‘I never would have imagined coming to a conservative event until the MAHA movement.’” Clark believes Kennedy has been “sent by God.”

“Many people on the right are becoming more interested in health and wellness, because we’re tying it to the continuation of the strong American family,” stated Andrea Mew, the managing editor of IW Features, the storytelling arm of the conservative nonprofit Independent Women. Mew can be a contributing author at Evie.

Katie Gaddini, a visiting scholar at Stanford University and affiliate professor on the Social Research Institute at University College London, sees parallels between the “exaggerated femininity” and “hard-bitten toughness” of the ladies behind these media ventures and the likes of Ann Coulter and Laura Ingraham, conservative pundits who rose to prominence within the Eighties and Nineties and “made conservatism cool and hidden and attractive and sexy” in unprecedented methods. Christian girls voters specifically, Gaddini stated, see in these personalities “a type of MAGA that they can get behind, which maybe they didn’t feel was as appealing with just Trump himself.” These publications are pulling girls who’re already conservative additional to the proper, Gaddini stated. 

“These platforms speak to women who want to be grounded in faith or family and still be leaders and creators,” stated Isabel Bogner, a reader based mostly in Miles City, Montana, who’s at the moment constructing a platform that highlights girls in management and politics. Bogner, who’s initially from Mexico and is married to a Republican member of the Montana State Senate, describes herself as a “Latina living as a political wife” on Instagram. She believes there’s a rising viewers of girls who need content material that’s “thoughtful, feminine, and values-driven.” 

In 2024, Foley, who profiled White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt that yr for The Conservateur, attended a celebration cohosted by the publication and the New York Young Republican Club. Spirits have been excessive, she stated. There was a three-hour open bar. “These women, they’re hungry for this kind of stuff, no matter where they work,” Foley stated, “whether that’s in fashion or at Fox.”