The Culture Wars Have Come for Lingerie — Martin Luther King, Jr., once observed that one of the “most segregated hours” in American life is Sunday at eleven in the morning, referring to church service. Today, the same might be said about the month of April as it unfolds in Indio, California, where throngs of people descend each year to worship at the altars of live music and brand activations. Two weekends are set aside for Coachella, the music festival known for its eclectic mix of headliners, from Björk to Bad Bunny; for its Summer of Love-inspired dress code (e.g., crocheted booty shorts); and for being the preferred setting for celebrity couples to make it desert official on Instagram. (This year, Katy Perry and her boyfriend, the former Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, sporting a backward baseball cap, posted from the arid environs.)
But, on the weekend after Coachella, the very same grounds are occupied by Stagecoach, a country-music festival that’s often thought of as the conservative Coachella—or “Trumpchella,” as one Reddit user put it. An event where influencers in cowboy boots and Marlboro Man jackets can take selfies with the Budweiser Clydesdales, it has a reputation as a safe space for uncritical displays of red-blooded American patriotism. Since 2020, though, the festival has been trying to promote a different image by banning displays of the Confederate flag, which some venders used to sell in bikini form. This year, near the main stage, where the rising star Ella Langley was singing her hit “Choosin’ Texas,” I saw a man wearing—in a show of inclusivity, perhaps—a shirt that read “Show me your boobs if you hate racism.”
Funnily enough, I was actually at the festival to investigate the political implications of cleavage. The month before, it had been announced that SYRN, the newly launched underwear line from the actress Sydney Sweeney, would be the “official lingerie partner” of Stagecoach. (The brand would have a pop-up karaoke bar on site—the SYRN Saloon—with daily panties giveaways.) The setting was certainly an interesting choice on the part of the “Euphoria” star, who spent the better part of last year running from the controversy over her ad for American Eagle Outfitters—also a sponsor of this year’s Stagecoach—in which, following a brief explainer on genetic determinism, a voice-over boasted of the blond, blue-eyed actress’s “great jeans.” The inspiration had seemingly been “Genes,” a near-identical ad that Brooke Shields did for Calvin Klein in the nineteen-eighties, but, in 2025, jokes about Sweeney’s supposed physical supremacy appeared to be giving free press to a right-wing talking point. By then, conservatives had concocted a theory that the fifties-pinup physique of Sweeney, a registered Republican, was an affront to progressive sensibilities; a year earlier, the National Post, a right-leaning news site, had raised the question “Are Sydney Sweeney’s breasts double-D harbingers of the death of woke?” While we were pretending not to be looking, breasts had somehow become Republican-coded.
Sweeney remained mostly silent throughout the fracas; “I’m in the arts. I’m not here to speak on politics,” she told Cosmopolitan. But was launching a lingerie brand itself a statement? When Lauren Sanchez showed up alongside her fiancé, Jeff Bezos, to Trump’s second swearing in with a white lace bra peeking out from under her Alexander McQueen pants suit, she inaugurated a surprising new front in America’s culture wars: lingerie. Through the tech venture-capital fund Coatue, Sanchez and Bezos have both provided financial backing for SYRN, as has Michael Dell, the billionaire founder of Dell Technologies and a prolific G.O.P. donor. And Trump himself, according to financial-disclosure documents filed with the U.S. Office of Government Ethics, purchased as much as a million dollars’ worth of Victoria’s Secret corporate bonds in December of 2025. Maybe he liked what he saw. In 2024, the company, under its new C.E.O., Hillary Super, had announced the return of its signature fashion show, which had been paused indefinitely in 2019. The year before, Ed Razek, the event’s producer, told Vogue that he had no plans to begin casting plus-size or transgender models (whom he called “transsexuals”) because the show was about “fantasy.” After public outcry, the company replaced its Angels—supermodel brand ambassadors—with the VS Collective, an advisory panel featuring the soccer star Megan Rapinoe and the transgender model and activist Valentina Sampaio. It also began selling nursing bras. But when Super came aboard, in 2024, she struck a different tone, telling the Wall Street Journal that her predecessor had “made decisions out of fear.” She also shared with Fortune that Victoria’s Secret would now be less “performative” when it came to diversity and would no longer necessarily “check every box and make sure every single thing someone could think of is covered.” This June, the company’s stock ticker was changed from VSCO to VSXY. (In a statement, Super told me that “what became clear” from her takeover “is that sexy still matters.”)
Inside the SYRN Saloon, which I had entered through batwing doors labelled “SS,” the crowd sang a rowdy rendition of Shania Twain’s “Man! I Feel Like a Woman!” I wondered whether anyone there knew that the song had been inspired by drag queens or that, when Twain made her début in Nashville, in 1993, she was shamed for her bare midriff and bed-tousled hair. When I was growing up, in the early two-thousands, “conservative” meant conservative. The right was the party of George W. Bush, abstinence-only sex education, and Christian evangelical teens who recited chastity pledges and wore promise rings under the banner of “True Love Waits.” Now, at Trumpchella, I was sipping a Made You Look margarita while examining SYRN’s Hoedown Throwdown: a three-pack of thongs emblazoned with slogans such as “tight jeans, loose morals” and “cowboys ride harder and stay on longer.”
Outside, I’d passed a man holding a sign that read “Hot Girls Eat Arby’s.” Last summer, the sandwich chain, which is owned by Roark Capital Group—named for the protagonist of Ayn Rand’s “The Fountainhead”—hired Sophie Cunningham, a W.N.B.A. player for the Indiana Fever, as a brand ambassador. (Cunningham, who follows the conservative provocateur Candace Owens on TikTok and recently told ESPN that “young girls” in sports “shouldn’t have to go against biological men,” became a right-wing darling for being her fellow white teammate Caitlin Clark’s on-court attack dog.) To announce the partnership, Cunningham posted a picture of herself slyly smiling in an Arby’s tee with the words “look who has the meats now.” How did this happen? How did the right get the meats?
“There’s been a mega-shift,” Raquel Debono, the founder of Make America Hot Again, which organizes mixers for young conservatives in New York City, told me. “It’s like the Mar-a-Lago face. Look at Fox News. Everyone’s got Botox, filler, and their tits out. It’s the bimbofication of MAGA.” The first election of Donald Trump, weeks after a 2005 “Access Hollywood” tape of him talking about grabbing women “by the pussy” was released, helped inspire the rise of “Barstool conservatism,” a kind of libertine libertarianism named for the comedy website Barstool Sports, whose founder, Dave Portnoy, once blogged that a certain female ESPN journalist’s “#1 requirement” was to “make men hard.” (Portnoy recently authored the memoir “Cancel Me If You Can.”) The “anti-woke” beer brand Ultra Right put out a “MAGA Babes” calendar that included women in red-white-and-blue bathing suits and Dana Loesch, the former Breitbart editor, hoisting two assault rifles into the air. “The vibe shift is real, and it’s spectacular,” Kat Rosenfield, of The Free Press, quipped, in a callback to the “Seinfeld” episode “The Implant,” in which Jerry questions the provenance of his new girlfriend’s breasts. For this faction, #MeToo had been not a reckoning but an opportunity—to cast the left as sex scolds and their own party as the one now singing along to Shania Twain: “I ain’t gonna act politically correct / I only wanna have a good time.”
The SYRN Saloon was filling up. Two young men standing near me began chanting, “We want Sydney! We want Sydney!” I asked why they liked the actress, not wanting to make assumptions. One replied, with a knowing grin, “Because she has great jeans.” A figure-skating coach from a nearby town shared that she hadn’t understood the fallout over Sweeney’s American Eagle ad. “Her job was to do a commercial, not to please every single person all across the country,” she said, sounding annoyed. Then she placed her hand on my shoulder and said, “I’m sorry.”
Finally, Sweeney—blindingly blond—arrived, wearing SYRN’s Date Night Satin Corset in Dew Me blue and Cowgirl Crush lace-ruffle miniskirt. “I have a special guest, everybody!” she yelled into a microphone, before inviting Chase Rice, who performed at the 2022 Turning Point USA festival, onstage to sing his 2012 bro-country anthem, “Cruise.” Next, she brought up the country star Riley Green, who had also performed at that festival. Sweeney’s boyfriend, the music manager Scooter Braun (a villain to Taylor Swift fans everywhere for purchasing her master recordings), watched from the side of the stage as the actress and Green began belting Garth Brooks’s “Friends in Low Places.”
I didn’t know what was real and what was provocation anymore. I just knew that I loved that song, though it seemed to mean something different in this context, as did the lacy bras in desert pastels that were hanging from the ceiling. How had everything been turned so upside down? Had conservatives taken sexy back, or was this all just an optical illusion, not unlike the kind created by a padded bra or a pair of Spanx? Or maybe it was as simple as a friend of mine had said: “Everyone is convinced their enemies are having bad sex.”
In 1965, Helen Gurley Brown, the author of “Sex and the Single Girl”—a self-help book for the career-minded woman in no rush to settle down—took over as the editor-in-chief of Cosmopolitan. Her very first issue included an article titled “Oh, What a Lovely Pill!,” about a new medication that could prevent unwanted pregnancies. “Good girls go to heaven—bad girls go everywhere,” Brown famously quipped, as her magazine became a user’s manual for the sexual revolution.
In 2019, a former model named Brittany Hugoboom, née Martinez, co-founded Evie magazine, envisioning it as “a conservative Cosmo” and “feminine, not feminist.” Scrolling through the site’s soft-pink hues and headlines such as “What the It Girls Are Wearing in Italy This Summer,” you could mistake it for a lot of content aimed at women these days, until you stumble on an article like “Being on Birth Control Made Me Feel Like a Failure, So I Chose Happiness Instead.” Much has been made of the manosphere, but Evie has set its sights on the red-pilled woman, who has replaced the supposed Kool-Aid of “having it all” feminism with MAHA-approved raw milk. (Evie even sells a “raw milkmaid dress,” which resembles a saucy peasant costume from Halloween Adventure.) According to internal company analytics, Evie, a mostly digital publication, received two hundred million impressions across its social-media channels in a month earlier this year. Its reader spends her pregnancy—one of many, ideally—pondering “The Most Masculine Boy Names of 2025.” If she does want birth control, she can use 28, Evie’s “menstrual wellness” app, which tracks users’ cycles and received funding from the Palantir co-founder Peter Thiel. For the woman who “does her own research,” there are pieces such as “Why You Shouldn’t Have Sex with Him If He’s Covid Vaccinated.”
Most Evie articles, however, encourage the act. This year’s annual print edition is titled “The Sex Issue” and includes a guide to dirty talk and a “blowjob checklist.” On the cover is a photo of a model dressed in lingerie—bridal, of course. At my suggestion, Hugoboom and I met for lunch at Altesi, an old-school Italian restaurant on the Upper East Side beloved by Ivana Trump, who reportedly purchased six dozen bras every six months. Hugoboom, who greeted me wearing a low-cut, form-fitting leopard-print dress and black high heels, had just seen “The Devil Wears Prada 2” and felt a pang of recognition. “When all the drama with that one article came out,” she said—referring to Miranda Priestly’s green-lighting of a fashion spread featuring a brand reliant on sweatshop labor—“I’m just, like, ‘Oh, I feel like I’ve been there.’ ” I asked which Evie article had stirred the most controversy. “The most recent one, which shouldn’t have caused drama, was ‘I’m a Hot Mom, and I’m Tired of Being Mom-shamed for It,’ ” she recalled, before imitating her detractors: “Moms shouldn’t have to be hot—they have a lot of things going on in their life.” She rolled her eyes.
Hugoboom, who grew up in California and Texas, told me that she conceived of Evie when she was living in Los Angeles and working as a model—what she described as her “Zoolandery” chapter. “A lot of it was sitting in traffic, going to castings in downtown L.A., getting things thrown at you by homeless people,” she explained. She needed a change and realized that, through her personal networks, she had “all of the categories of a magazine lined up.” From modelling, she knew a lot of makeup artists. “O.K., so that’s Beauty,” she recalled thinking. She knew the personal trainers who worked with Victoria’s Secret models—“So that’s, like, Health.” She co-founded Evie with her husband, Gabriel Hugoboom; the two met at the University of Dallas when she was eighteen, at a pool party. She remained a virgin until her wedding night, seven years later. “So we know relationships pretty well,” she told me. She also saw an opening in the media landscape. The world of women’s magazines had become “hyperpolarized,” she believed, made up of avowedly feminist outlets like Jezebel and Vice’s Broadly, but she couldn’t find “the kind of girly-pop type of magazines that I loved when I was younger.” She took a sip of her cappuccino. “I’ve always just loved femininity,” she said. “I think because my mom was a flight attendant.”
In a Substack post announcing “The Sex Issue,” Hugoboom wrote that right-wing critics of “casual sex” had “no clear and exciting vision for an alternative.” The glittering signifiers of the sexually liberated life style—stilettos, mimosas, moaning—had been ascribed by shows like “Sex and the City” to single women in Democratic cities, as conservatives preached restraint. “Who wants that?” she asked. Hugoboom was essentially proposing a takeover: “The best, most fulfilling sex comes when you and your spouse commit to learning the art and science of pleasure.” “The Sex Issue” was in fact quite technical, with a detailed diagram of the clitoris and a comprehensive list of pelvic-floor exercises. Hugoboom explained that Evie’s readers needed the basics covered; she had received frantic D.M.s from women who had saved themselves for marriage and were feeling less than rapturous. “It would be, like, ‘I waited twenty-seven years to have sex, and now I’m psychologically damaged,’ ” she said.