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      Thanks to Donald Trump, Apple’s new AirPods will make America hear again | John Naughton

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      Like many professional scribblers, I sometimes have to write not in a hushed study or library, but in noisy environments. So years ago I bought a set of Apple AirPods Pro, neat little gadgets that have a limited degree of noise-cancelling ability. They’re not as effective as the clunky (and pricey) headphones that seasoned transcontinental airline passengers need, but they’re much lighter and less obtrusive. And they have a button that enables you to switch off the noise cancellation and hear what’s going on around you.I remember wondering once if a version of them could also function as hearing aids, given the right software. But then dismissed the thought: after all, hearing aids are expensive, specialised devices that are often prescribed by audiologists – and also signal to the world at large that you are hard of hearing.But guess what? On 12 September, I open my laptop, click on the Verge website and find the headline: “Apple gets FDA authorisation to turn the AirPods Pro into hearing aids.” The new generation of the headphones will be able to serve as clinical-grade hearing aids later this autumn. More importantly, they can be bought over the counter (OTC in the lingo of the healthcare industry) and they will sell for $249 in the US (and £229 in the UK). Compare that with the prices of hearing aids sold by, say, Specsavers, which start at £495 and go all the way to £2,995 for the Phonak Infinio Sphere 90.Now of course price comparisons can be misleading. Vendors of conventional hearing aids will stress that customers get the undivided attention of an audiologist etc. And for customers with severe hearing difficulties, that’s fine. But for people with “mild to moderate hearing impairment”, even the US FDA (Food and Drug Administration) has concluded that the customisation software provided by Apple will be adequate.It works like this. You take an on-demand hearing test on your iPhone’s health app, which causes the earbuds to ping each ear with different frequencies at varying volumes. You tap the phone screen if you hear the sound. After a few minutes, the app will generate an audiogram that graphs your hearing deficits and this audiogram can then be used to program the AirPods Pro as hearing aids. Alternatively, you can upload an existing audiogram if you’ve had one generated by an audiologist.Neat, eh? And also a nice example of engineering ingenuity. But, as with most things, the technology is only part of the story. The healthcare industry in the US is tightly controlled by the FDA, which insisted for years that any device that goes into a human ear needs a prescription. As Matt Stoller, an antitrust expert and campaigner, points out, since 1993, campaigners have been calling for the FDA to loosen its stance on these devices and the calls got louder over the years. In 2015, the president’s council of advisers on science and technology issued a report seeking to make these devices more widely available. The next year, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine issued a similar report.But eventually, in 2017, Congress passed the Over-the-Counter Hearing Aid Act, proposed by senators Elizabeth Warren and Chuck Grassley and requiring the FDA to allow hearing aids without a prescription – and Donald Trump signed it! The act imposed a deadline of 2020 on the FDA, but the agency continually prevaricated until 2022, after the Biden administration compelled it to act with an executive order. Only then did the dam that had been building up since 1993 break.The moral of this story, in Stoller’s words, is simple: “How we deploy technology is not a function of engineering and science as much as it is how those interplay with law, in this case a law that fostered a hearing aid cartel and then a different law that broke it apart. So it’s not outlandish to say that Joe Biden designed Apple’s new hearing aid AirPods, with an assist from Elizabeth Warren, Chuck Grassley and Donald Trump. It’s just what happened.”This is perhaps a bit hyperbolic, but it captures an essential truth that Silicon Valley would prefer to ignore: technology does not exist in a vacuum, and the ways it is deployed and developed are shaped by social and political forces. Social media companies escape liability because of a 26-word clause in a 1996 law, for example. And millions of people in the US suffering from hearing impairment could have had hearing aids at affordable prices at least a decade ago. The problem was not that the technology didn’t exist, but that it wasn’t in the interest of the healthcare-regulatory establishment to make it available.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionWhat I’ve been readingBad pressJeff Jarvis, the veteran journalist and City University of New York emeritus professor, has an insightful analysis on his blog titled What’s become of The Times & Co? about why US mainstream media has gone wrong.Top MarxThe Enduring Influence of Marx’s Masterpiece is a marvellous introduction by Wendy Brown to a new translation of Das Kapital.Head case A lovely essay by Erik J Larson is The Left Brain Delusion, which argues that we’re too governed by one side of our grey matter. More

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      What does the American dream mean in 2024? New York fashion week had thoughts

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      I’m writing this as New York fashion week comes to a close, and it’s been a whirlwind six days of shows and antics. Rihanna kept everyone waiting for almost an hour at Alaïa. Wu-Tang Clan popped up with a surprise performance onboard the Tommy Hilfiger ferry and Luar closed out the week with a front-row appearance by Madonna. As for the catwalks? There was one dominant theme that you couldn’t miss, from chinos to varsity jackets and knitted sweaters: preppy is well and truly back.This way of dressing originally took its inspiration from Ivy League sports clubs and campuses. It is a trend that is heavily rooted in class and identity and it comes at a time when these issues are at the forefront of American politics, with the 2024 presidential election less than two months away. Politics was also, naturally, a hot topic on and off the catwalks. Prabal Gurung took his post-show bow in a T-shirt emblazoned with “VOTE” on the front and “Harris/Walz” on the back. Anna Wintour and Jill Biden hit the streets of Manhattan alongside designers including Thom Browne, Michael Kors and Tory Burch as part of a non-partisan voting awareness march organised by the Council of Fashion Designers of America and Vogue. And fresh from her appearance at the DNC, Ella Emhoff, the 25-year-old stepdaughter of Democratic candidate Kamala Harris, was the model and front-row guest of choice for a string of designers including Burch and Coach.But the preppy trend provided the most food for thought. It feeds into a wider commentary from designers on the American dream and what that concept means and looks like in 2024. Immigration is a key part of the notion, and it also happens to be one of the crucial policies that both US parties are grappling with.Ralph Lauren, the son of Jewish immigrants who grew up in the Bronx and now has a reported net worth of £5.3bn, is often held up as the embodiment of the term. His picture-perfect spectacle on Thursday night in the Hamptons oozed an old-money lifestyle that is certainly one version of the dream. Speaking at a reception before the show, where waiters clad in white RL polo tops handed out champagne and miniature lobster rolls, the actor Laura Dern mused on Lauren’s version of preppy. “There is always deep iconography connected to America,” she said. “He loves American traditions and family has always been embedded in his stories. It’s always playful and hopeful. With everything going on, to feel hopeful is a nice feeling.”View image in fullscreenIf Lauren’s world is a version of the American dream as lived by the 1%, Willy Chavarria’s commentary was a little more democratic. Chavarria, who was born in California near the Mexican border, is the son of an Irish-American mother and Mexican-American father. The designer said he wanted to “celebrate immigration and those people who have built the country and are still the backbone of the country”. His show was held in a disused bank on Wall Street, and guests arrived to find a giant US flag hoisted above them and a copy of the American constitution on their seats. Chavarria said he added the accent to the show’s name, América, because this is how the word “is heard through the voice of an immigrant or the child of an immigrant”. The clothes riffed on uniforms – cargo pants and neat button-down shirts – and were said to be a celebration of the workforce. In a nod to farm workers, some wore bandanas wrapped around their faces. “The collection is a story of empowerment,” the designer said. And while Chavarria’s price point is out of reach for most blue-collar workers (trousers cost about £600), it did feel as if he was planting the seed for a new type of American style. “It’s really about the fact that all of us belong, all of us have purpose, and all of us have the ability to make change in this country, especially starting with the vote.”With an invitation that mirrored the American green card, Off-White’s Ib Kamara was also thinking about immigration. Kamara said he had decided to show in New York rather than the brand’s usual slot at Paris because he wanted to bring the brand, which was founded by the late American designer Virgil Abloh, “home”. Kamara explained that, growing up in Sierra Leone, “America was a dream”. “If you want luxury, you come to America. It’s a dream place. You feel hopeful when you come.”Stuart Vevers, the British designer and creative director of Coach, who sent Emhoff down the catwalk wearing an “I heart NY” T-shirt, also spoke about hope. “There’s a sense of optimism in the next generation,” Vevers said. “There’s a lot of hope. They’re going to change things.”To read the complete version of this newsletter – complete with this week’s trending topics in The Measure and your wardrobe dilemmas solved – subscribe to receive Fashion Statement in your inbox every Thursday. More

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      ‘Very rude’: the late Queen’s salty verdict on Donald Trump

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      Name: Rude Trump.Age: The former US president, Donald Trump, met the late Queen Elizabeth II on a couple of occasions: tea at Windsor Castle in 2018 …The Tyrant Who Came to Tea. Melania came, too. And then the following year at Buckingham Palace during a state visit.I remember. He enjoyed it, no? His former Russia adviser Fiona Hill wrote in her White House memoir that he considered a “meeting with the Queen of England was the ultimate sign that he … had made it in life.” And paying tribute to the Queen when she died, Trump himself wrote that he would never forget her “generous friendship, great wisdom and wonderful sense of humour”.Yeah, like he would know anything about that! Anyway, was it mutual, this admiration and respect? Er, not so much, according to Craig Brown’s new biography, A Voyage Around the Queen, now being serialised in the Daily Mail.Which says? That she found Trump “very rude”.No way! Trump rude? Yeah, I know, but you might have expected him to behave for the Queen of all people.She must have hosted a few controversial leaders during her reign? Putin, Assad, Mugabe, Amin. “She may not have found their company convivial; upon their departure, she may even have voiced a discreet word of disapproval,” wrote Brown.And of all the leaders it was Trump who she found rude! Was it something to do with royal protocol? Well, he did break that, by walking in front of the monarch when they inspected a guard of honour.Probably broke wind too, Trump by name … If he did that’s not covered in the book. What the Queen is said to have “particularly disliked” was the way the former president “couldn’t stop looking over her shoulder, as though in search of others more interesting”.More interesting than the actual Queen! Well, quite. Plus, she also “believed Trump ‘must have some sort of arrangement’ with his wife, Melania, or else why would she have remained married to him?”Queen Elizabeth II, she certainly spoke for her people. She certainly did.Do say: [In the voice of King Charles] “Tea, President Harris?”Don’t say: [As above] “Oh God, it’s you again.” More

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      Model candidate: the style lesson Kamala Harris can learn from Shirley Chisholm

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      The energy that Kamala Harris’s candidacy has injected into the Democratic party has taken over the election. With standing-room only rallies that have rock concert vibes, Harris has not only sharpened her rhetoric and message since her 2020 bid for the presidency, but she has also brought new spirit for the campaign.However, Harris’s style – which could be employed as a political tool to aid her candidacy and connection with voters – has shifted only slightly. Despite wearing a few outfits that have more color than her usual choice of navy and black, Harris has so far shied away from bold fashion statements that would convey the historic nature of her candidacy, or the excitement she stirs. While the campaign has certainly expanded the political imagination of what Harris can achieve, it still needs to hone in on what image defines her new status as a presidential nominee.Unlike Hillary Clinton, Nancy Pelosi and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who are known for fashion statements that effectively telegraph power and political shrewdness, Harris is not known for her sartorial savviness. In 2020, she branched out of her comfort zone by posing for Vogue in her Chuck Taylor All Stars or by wearing a white suit with a pussy-bow blouse during her victory speech as a tribute to the suffragists, but her fashion choices during her tenure as vice-president can be best described as safe. Harris is fond of corporate pantsuits in dark colors, a form of functional power dressing that has defined her career as an attorney general and a senator. Often paired with soft feminine blouses, high heels and delicate pearl jewelry, Harris maintains her femininity without letting it stand out.View image in fullscreenThere is some sense to this choice of style. The tailored suit is a symbol of power, professionalism and also masculinity. And as a Black woman on Capitol Hill, Harris has used the dark suit as a shield that allows her to blend in. It provides authority and legitimacy, two important qualities needed for a leader. This strategy was especially useful for Harris in her role as vice-president. Her outfits were so unremarkable they faded into the background.But as recent years have shown, a candidate’s style is an important element in crafting a political image and building a successful brand. It brings recognition and visibility while also helping to boost identification and campaign merchandise sales. Donald Trump turned his ill-fitted suits and Maga trucker hat into a trademark of his persona, conveying an image of “a regular, simple guy” that appeals to his base of white, rural, working-class voters. The sloppy tailoring hides the fact that his suits cost tens of thousands of dollars, and that his background is rooted not in the coal mines of Appalachia but in the boardrooms of Wall Street.View image in fullscreenFashionable accessories have also helped Joe Biden to project a vigorous image, presenting a cool and in-control look that signals vitality and leadership. His signature Ray-Ban 3025 aviators amplify his “dark Brandon” identity, and project the image of a confident president who pushes defiantly against his critics while getting the work done.But fashion functions differently for Biden and Trump. Unlike Harris, who needs to navigate an entire set of expectations and stereotypes about her presence in politics, they don’t need to worry about “looking presidential”. Being white men, that is almost a given. Fashion for them is just one tool in their political strategy box – one they can use but not be defined by.For Harris, however, fashion presents a different challenge. Female politicians, and specifically female politicians of color, have endured much more scrutiny (and misogyny) regarding their bodies and appearance. They have long needed to balance between the need to demonstrate their capability as leaders and conforming to gender norms of femininity. Much more than men, whose presence in politics is never questioned, women need to fashion themselves in a way that will prove their fitness for office and to claim their power.View image in fullscreenSo far, Harris has preferred to dodge the fashion issue, but as the campaign continues to gain steam, attention on her appearance mounts. Although there is no playbook for how a woman can “look presidential”, Harris can reach to the past – and to the only other Black female Democratic presidential candidate, Shirley Chisholm – for inspiration.The daughter of a dressmaker, Chisholm understood both the importance of presentation and of execution, viewing it as an important means of self-expression. Her clothes were often custom-made, and she was active in the design process. She cultivated a unique signature style through her bouffant hairdo, cat-eye glasses and brightly colored ladylike suits. Chisholm’s savvy dressing won her the title of the “best dresser in Congress” from the Washington press, and also helped her project a modern image of Black femininity. Refusing to be boxed into norms of respectability that expected Black women to be quiet and accommodating, Chisholm’s fashions nonetheless conveyed professionalism and propriety that commanded respect.As the first Black woman to be elected to Congress, Chisholm embraced the visibility of the position. She harnessed her style to create an unapologetic proud image of a person who refused to be silenced or muted, which worked well with her campaign message of “unbought and unbossed”. Known for saying, “if they don’t give you a seat at the table, bring a folding chair,” Chisholm’s bold fashion statements enabled her to claim her right to power and influence.View image in fullscreenCombining knee-high boots and geometric prints together with church-lady style, Chisholm’s strategy was to maintain a feminine appearance that did not alienate voters or mark her as a “radical”. And while she was not known for wearing pants (it would take Carol Moseley-Braun, the first Black female senator, to lead this revolution), Chisholm showed that there could be a strong Black feminist woman in politics, even when sticking to feminine styles.Chisholm’s style provides a model for Harris of a female politician who was a strong, fearless advocate for women and people of color, while also being a smart dresser with a touch of creativity and fun. The Harris campaign already showed they were open to emulating Chisholm when it changed its logo typeface to resemble that of Chisholm’s presidential campaign. It is now time to embrace Chisholm’s fashion strategy, too.With the Democratic national convention starting on Monday, Harris has the opportunity to define what a female president could look like. Chisholm once advised that we should reject not only the stereotypes that others have of us, but also those we have of ourselves. Harris can listen to this advice as she tries to convince voters to imagine a world in which a Black and Asian woman can be a president. She could also use some styling tips while sending this message; Shirley would certainly approve. More

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      Harris-Walz merch unites gen X dads – and Chappell Roan fans: ‘We’re not used to politicians making cool choices’

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      With less than 100 days to go until the election, Kamala Harris announced her VP pick – the avuncular Minnesota governor Tim Walz – and dropped a new official logo.Harris-Walz merchandise, including yard signs, T-shirts, and one much-memed camouflage printed hat, launched as soon as the current vice-president put Walz on her ticket on Tuesday. The logo looks simple, with some even calling it boring: tall, white, sans serif lettering spelling out the nominees’ last names.“The logo needs a little more [flair] to reflect the excitement of the base,” read one tweet posted to X. “Oh my god this is minimalist hell get me out of here,” said another.But, as Hunter Schwarz pointed out for Fast Company, others viewed the logo as historic, tracing its branding back to Shirley Chisholm’s 1972 presidential campaign. Chisholm, the first Black congresswoman and first Black woman to run for a major party’s nomination, used all-caps, sans serif lettering. (Harris took nods from Chisholm’s campaign design when running in 2019.)“The logo looks bold and strong, and the brilliance of it is that it doesn’t have to be clever,” said Ross Turner, a graphic designer who works on political campaigns.Turner noted that the Harris Walz design looks similar to Trump Vance signs, which also utilize an all-caps, sans serif font. “I initially thought, wow, Harris kind of dropped the ball, because this looks so much like the Trump logo,” Turner said. “Isn’t the goal to differentiate? But they didn’t have to differentiate with the logo, because Harris already does as a candidate. And [Republicans] can’t turn around and mock this logo, because then they’d have to do the same for Trump since it’s so similar.”View image in fullscreen“I like their lack of preciousness,” said Charles Nix, senior executive creative director of the typeface company Monotype. “The speed of this campaign and this design coming together demands a sort of truth. It doesn’t have a full year to be tested in focus groups. It speaks plainly and urgently.”“They’re clearly emphasizing Harris,” said Katherine Haenschen, an assistant professor of communications and political science at Northeastern University. “It’s a good, solid logo.”If the campaign’s logo is straightforward, its merch comes off as more playful. One $40 camo hat with Harris Walz embroidered in orange looks strikingly similar to a cap sold by the gen Z pop star Chappell Roan in support of her Midwest Princess tour.View image in fullscreenWalz, a game-hunting Minnesotan who signed gun control measures into law, was wearing a camo baseball cap when he got the call from Harris offering him the VP slot, and he’s worn camo in the past. But some online commentators are reading into the campaign’s cap, released Tuesday after a high-energy rally in Philadelphia, as a nod to Roan. The singer even posted a side-by-side of her merch with the Harris-Walz hat on X, writing: “is this real.”The cap, which the campaign called “the most iconic political hat in America”, can be interpreted as a rebuttal to Donald Trump’s red Maga option. The gen-X-dad styling might be seen as an attempt to appeal to middle American voters who might actually use it while hunting. “There’s a lot of connotations with camouflage print and preparing for battle, which I’m sure crossed the in-house design team’s mind, given how fraught the leadup to November is going to be,” said the fashion writer Freya Drohan. Fitting, too, as one of the Harris campaign’s slogans is “when we fight, we win”.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionOne could even imagine coastal hypebeasts who have never held a gun in their lives wearing the hat: camo has emerged as one of 2024’s most unlikely fashion trends, seen on runways from Balenciaga to A$AP Rocky’s AWGE label.“This is the bushwick x los feliz unity that our nation needs,” wrote the comedian Desus Nice on X about the hat, citing two hip neighborhoods in Brooklyn and Los Angeles where it’s not uncommon to see people dressed in what can only be described as fish and game warden-chic.“I’m personally really encouraged that it seems like the campaign is listening to young voices,” said Ziad Ahmed, head of Next Gen, a gen Z marketing practice at United Talent Agency. “I think everyone can feel that energy across the internet right now. When we first saw the hat, we almost couldn’t believe our eyes, as we are so not used to our politicians actually making good, cool, smart choices.”Nate Jones, an executive at UTA Next Gen, added that he wanted to buy Harris merchandise after she announced her bid, but felt “quite disappointed” by the lineup. “I didn’t see anything I would actually wear, until this hat,” he said. “It’s simultaneously street style and gen X dad style.” Jones ordered the cap, which is expected to drop in early October. The Harris campaign told Teen Vogue it sold $1m worth of caps in less than 24 hours.Merch alone will not win an election, but the excitement around the hat reiterates how Harris’ presidential bid continues to liven up a once dreary election cycle. It’s also clear that Harris’s team has set its sights on delivering viral moments meant to thrill the very-online voting bloc.“It is my hope that those in power continue to pay attention to what young voters are saying across the internet,” Ahmed said. “Not just to draw inspiration for their next merch drop, but also to shape their policy platforms that will define our generation’s present as well as our future.” More

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      From RFK Jr’s dead bear to a shot dog, why do US politicians keep throwing us red meat?

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      I had never really engaged with how spooky Robert F Kennedy Jr looked until I saw him describe, in a video, the circumstances in which he ended up driving around with a dead baby bear in his boot. It sounds a lot more like an anxiety dream than a thing that happened, but here you go: the independent US presidential candidate had been taking some people falconing in the Hudson valley, in 2014, when he saw a woman hit and kill a bear with her van.Kennedy decided to skin and eat it, so he picked it up, only remembering later that he didn’t have time to do either of those things, because he was going out for dinner in New York and taking a flight straight after. Can’t take a dead bear cub on a flight. He had bought only hold luggage and this was carrion. Sorry.He dumped the cub in Central Park, New York, putting a bicycle on top of it, hoping to incriminate a mystery cyclist, because that is exactly what would happen if you cycled into a bear – you would place your bike on top of it, then scarper. Even though Central Park is bear-free, and the police quickly determined the bike was a red herring and established the cause of death as a traffic collision, no further action was taken.The story remained buried, with the bear, until the New Yorker got wind of it and smoked out Kennedy’s account while fact-checking a story. By posting the video, he shot their fox, if you like, but would never skin and eat that. Who would eat a metaphorical fox?If anyone would, it would be this guy. Vanity Fair recently published an old picture of Kennedy and an unidentified woman eating what looked a lot like a dog on a spit, verifying with a vet that it matched the canine rib formation. Kennedy denied this, saying that there were three things he would never eat – a person, a monkey or a dog – and that this was goat. Inconveniently, goats also have 13 pairs of ribs.This question – what you are prepared to kill and eat – feels alien to British political discussion, but has cropped up more than once in the US. Kristi Noem, the governor of South Dakota, was a contender for Trump’s ticket until she wrote a memoir about killing a dog and a goat in a single day in horrific circumstances (she had to shoot the goat twice, with an interval while she went back to the truck to get another bullet).God knows, it helps nobody to relitigate the justice of the kills – suffice it to say that the dog’s crime was acting like a dog and the goat’s smelling like a goat. She said explicitly about the revelation that it was just the top line in a book full of “more real, honest and politically incorrect stories that’ll have the media gasping”; it was a blunt bit of message delivery, the message being: “I love guns, I’ll stand up to the kind of do-gooders who bleat on about cruelty and I love attention.” What else could a newly radicalised Republican party want in a vice president?Well, they want the kind of systems change that won’t be delivered by goats, culled ineffectually, one at a time. Get women back in the kitchen, then they will listen.Kennedy, his emphasis all on the eating, none on the killing, is tapping into a different strain of political self-fashioning: “Real men eat meat, only meat, any meat, as long as it’s big meat.” The Canadian culture warrior Jordan Peterson was its poster boy, although his daughter Mikhaila was the true prophet of the meat, salt and water diet, on YouTube and elsewhere. This reflects the broader trend that while meat-only diets generally end with a bit of primal and hypermasculinist philosophising, the box-office meatfluencers are predominantly women. It can’t be “incel”-adjacent if ladies are also into it. Except, don’t be fooled, it can.I’m just dreading the next phase, where the British “popular” “Conservatives” start to ape their American counterparts, as they always do, and the Instagram reel arrives of Liz Truss trapping a squirrel. The RSPCA had better be ready. Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist

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      Sundresses and rugged self-sufficiency: ‘tradwives’ tout a conservative American past … that didn’t exist

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      View image in fullscreen“Hey guys, and welcome back to my channel! Today, I’m going to be giving some tips for the ladies on how to attract a masculine man – a provider man,” the perky blonde woman tells the camera. Beaming and dressed in a pink dress complete with matching sweater, her swoop of blonde hair pinned back with a pearly headband, the woman rattles off her tips.“You want to look feminine, you want to be fit and take care of yourself and you want to be friendly,” the twentysomething woman continues. “I feel like the most feminine women I’ve come into encounter with are very peaceful. So have a sense of peace about you. Be content in your life without a man and pray for the right one to come your way.”She added: “You should be smiling a lot.”Meet Estee Williams. With more than 100,000 followers on Instagram, another 200,000 on TikTok and a history of appearances on shows like Dr Phil and Piers Morgan, Williams is one of the most prominent faces of an internet phenomenon-slash-controversy: the traditional wife, or “tradwife”.Tradwives first began trending online in 2020, when people were looking to wring excitement and comfort out of the smallest household tasks. Although there’s no single definition of “tradwife” – and many female influencers who’ve been decorated with the label don’t use it or even reject it – you know the tradwife when you see her. She is probably baking sourdough in an immaculate outfit, has a gaggle of kids (or wants them), and suggests – either silently or very loudly, like Williams – that life is better when women adhere to “traditional” gender roles and perfect at-home domesticity and nurturing.With the selection of JD Vance as Donald Trump’s running mate, the values that undergird the tradwife lifestyle are taking center stage at the highest levels of politics. Vance has fashioned himself as a champion of the so-called nuclear family, disparaging “the sexual revolution” and divorce. Days after the US supreme court overturned Roe v Wade in 2022, Vance tweeted: “If your worldview tells you that it’s bad for women to become mothers but liberating for them to work 90 hours a week in a cubicle at the New York Times or Goldman Sachs, you’ve been had.”He has also suggested that Kamala Harris, who is likely to become the Democratic nominee for president after Joe Biden ended his presidential campaign on Sunday, should not have political power because she does not have biological children.“Why have we let the Democrat party become controlled by people who don’t have any children? And why is this just a normal fact of American life?” Vance asked during a 2021 Virginia talk. “That the leaders of our country should be people who don’t have a personal and direct stake in it via their own offspring, via their own children?” Harris has two step-children.Vance’s own wife, Usha Vance, earned a law degree from Yale Law School as well as a master’s from Cambridge University. She clerked for Brett Kavanaugh before he joined the supreme court, and, up until JD Vance’s nomination for the vice-presidency, worked at a law firm that describes itself as “radically progressive”. Usha Vance resigned from the firm last week to focus on supporting her family.Tradwives are trending – and Vance is rising – as the United States is being roiled by fights over gender rights, which are only set to intensify if Trump and Harris go head to head. American women are grappling with a backlash against abortion rights, their economic mobility and feminism itself. They are also dealing with the failure of US social programs to keep up with the rising cost of living or to provide meaningful support for working moms. As of 2023, the United States was one of only six countries on the planet – as well as the only rich country – not to offer any kind of national paid leave.Tradwives portray a fundamentally conservative and individual solution to that societal failure: retreat not only into the home, but also into history. Using the iconography of an idealized past, they evoke the economic and emotional fantasy that families, and especially women, can opt out of the complexity of modern society. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could choose to live on one income? Wouldn’t it be nice if you could choose to stay home and raise children, rather than be forced into it because childcare is so damn expensive?In reality, that past was only made possible through extensive government intervention – the kind to which modern Republicans are fiercely opposed.A softer lifeFor the internet to dub you a tradwife, you typically have to be more than a homemaker. You must swath yourself in an aesthetic that draws from a vast and varied array of historical reference points.The account of Gwen the Milkmaid, a blonde who boasts about 70,000 TikTok followers and a backstory as a former OnlyFans worker turned God-fearing tradwife, lives at the center of a Venn diagram of common tradwife inspirations: the nuclear family of the 1950s, Little House on the Prairie, and a 19th-century belief in “separate spheres”, when men went out to Do Industry while women upheld a cult of domesticity. Gwen likes to frolic in sundresses, “homestead” in the Canadian suburbs, and glory in “the feminine urge to take care of your husband and make him food all the time”. (Gwen also throws in a distinctly modern set of pseudoscientific beliefs, like “the sun doesn’t cause cancer”.) Above all, tradwives like Gwen preach self-sufficiency.But 19th-century homesteading, the source of so much inspiration for both tradwives and the GOP – was not a private endeavor undertaken by hardy men and their supportive wives. It was the result of the huge government subsidy program known as the Homestead Act. The 1950s, another conservative inspiration, were also shaped by government subsidies for housing and education – as well as a post-second world war movement to pressure women out of the workforce – that briefly made it economically possible for vast numbers of white American women to live as housewives. (These subsidies were nowhere near as available to people of color.)The women of the 19th century and 1950s also lived without the right to birth control or, after they were invented, credit cards. (Gwen the Milkmaid is skeptical of the former.) Domestic violence was not taken seriously. Rape victims’ sexual history could be brought up in trials, while marital rape was not even a crime. There’s a reason that the 1963 publication of The Feminine Mystique, a book about the widespread unhappiness of white middle-class housewives – written by a white middle-class housewife – triggered the advent of second-wave feminism.View image in fullscreen“None of these people would seriously want to go back to a period when a man had a right to rape his wife,” said Stephanie Coontz, the author of six acclaimed books about the history of marriage and families, including her forthcoming book For Better and Worse: The Problematic Past and the Challenging Future of Marriage. Tradwives are nostalgic for the 1950s because, she said, “they’re looking back at a time when it was economically possible for a woman who didn’t want to work out of the home to stay home.”The social and economic conditions that made the nuclear family structure so dominant in the 1950s were also exceedingly unique. Except for this post-war period, it has been far from traditional for US families to be made up of a breadwinner husband, a wife who stays home to do unpaid cooking and cleaning as well as 2.5 kids who get to enjoy an extended childhood.“The tradwives misrepresent what they are doing as what everybody used to do,” Coontz said.Many so-called tradwives do openly work for money – often through home-based small businesses, influencing or a combination of the two, such as selling courses on how to be a stay-at-home influencer. Like all influencers, their product is their own lifestyle.‘A sneaky little bit of prosperity gospel’Tradwifery is not a monolith, and some of the most popular women who have been labeled “tradwives” by the internet don’t talk about politics or gender roles. But social media algorithms and chatter can co-opt them into conservative projects about femininity and families that these women may not personally support.The internet has crowned @Ballerinafarm, whose real name is Hannah Neeleman, the queen of tradwifery. Neeleman, who told the New York Times that she was unfamiliar with the term “tradwife”, has 9 million followers on Instagram, eight children, and a husband whose father has founded airlines, among them JetBlue. They all live on a working farm in Utah, where Neeleman – who has a mane of blond hair that would make Cinderella jealous – helps run the farm, cooks meals from scratch and competes in beauty pageants. Neeleman has been doing this since before the Covid pandemic struck, but after being literally crowned Mrs American, Neeleman competed in Mrs World this year days after giving birth and rocketed to mainstream fame.Neeleman leans into the homesteading aesthetic, framing herself as a “city folk” Juilliard-trained ballerina who chose to go back to the land. But, unlike Estee Williams (who supports Donald Trump) and Gwen the Milkmaid (who doesn’t seem to like Justin Trudeau), Neeleman does not talk about her politics. Same goes for the model Nara Smith, a mother of three with 8 million followers on TikTok. Although Smith is open about her work as a model, describes herself as a “working mom” and is more likely to cook in a slinky slip than gingham, she has also been labeled a tradwife.She’s known for videos where she’ll whisper things like: “My husband has been loving Snickers bars and when he was craving one, I just decided to make him a batch myself.” Other recent productions include homemade Cheez-Its and cough drops, because Smith “doesn’t usually keep cough drops or traditional medicine in the house”. She cooks the messy cough drops while wearing a (white!) dress that retails for $2,990. Her motherhood and marriage look effortless – which may be the source of the tradwife label.“The sort of totalizing world of the tradwife – she’s in control of her home, she’s in her home, she’s controlling the food that comes in, controlling the media that comes in – there’s a real appeal to purity,” said Kelsey Kramer McGinnis, an adjunct professor at Iowa’s Grand View University. “There is a sneaky little bit of prosperity gospel thinking in here. ‘If you live this lifestyle, if you do this thing that God is calling you to [do] as a woman, he will provide. And not only will he provide, he will provide beautifully. He will provide a beautiful family, a beautiful home, beautiful surroundings, a beautiful body.’”McGinnis first encountered tradwives because, as she researched Christian influencers for her forthcoming book on Christian parenting, her social media algorithm presumed she’d be interested in tradwives, too.“I really quickly started to realize that there was a ton of overlap. Not just among the people making it but among the audience,” said McGinnis, who has written about tradwives for Christianity Today.View image in fullscreenAfter I watched several Williams videos on YouTube, the platform started serving me ads for the Alliance Defending Freedom, the powerhouse Christian law firm that masterminded the overturning of Roe and continues to chip away at abortion and LGBTQ+ rights. In May, Media Matters for America found that watching tradwife content on TikTok led its “For You” Page to be flooded with far-right conspiracy theory content “within an afternoon”.Estee Williams, Gwen, Neeleman and Smith did not respond to detailed lists of questions from the Guardian for this story through their email addresses and social media accounts. Smith did also not immediately reply to a request for comment through her representation at IMG Models.‘Starting with the American family’Despite the tradwives’ popularity, it’s not financially feasible for many women to quit their jobs. It’s not even clear that women want to. Almost 80% of women between the ages of 25 and 54 are now part of the US workforce.While Maga Republicans like Vance have a lot to say about the “traditional” family, they don’t seem interested in reviving the kind of widespread social programs that enabled it. Vance has called universal childcare “a massive subsidy to the lifestyle preferences of the affluent over the preferences of the middle and working class”.Project 2025, a policy playbook written by the influential conservative thinktank the Heritage Foundation, has a litany of proposals aimed at the intersection of labor and family life that stop well short of a full-spectrum social safety net. The playbook suggests improving retirement savings for families where only one spouse works, allowing workers to accumulate time off and incentivizing employers to provide on-site childcare.“We must replace ‘woke’ nonsense with a healthy vision of the role of labor policy in our society, starting with the American family,” Project 2025 adds. To that end, its architects propose that the Department of Labor to “commit to honest study of the challenges for women in the world of professional work”.Inadvertently or not, tradwives are already supplying an answer to this study, and it’s one that conservatives may like: what if women just stayed home? More

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      in US Politics

      Monica Lewinsky wants to get out the vote – one $300 blazer at a time

      by

      Last Friday, the LA-based brand Reformation, best known for its silky, floral dresses, teased an image from a forthcoming workwear collection. The pictures on Instagram featured a woman with her back turned to the camera wearing a black pencil skirt, white shirt and pointy heels in an office overlooking a city skyline. “We’re giving you the power. With some help from a friend,” read the cryptic caption.Fast forward to Monday and that “friend” was unveiled as Monica Lewinsky. In the images, the writer and activist wears various pieces from the collection, including a cream trouser suit (from £298; $278), a belted leather trench coat (£798; $798) and cherry-red flared midi skirt with a matching sleeveless top (£298).But there’s more to the campaign than great silhouettes. With the US presidential election only eight months away, Reformation has teamed up with Vote.org, a nonpartisan organisation that helps register people to vote. The Reformation homepage now has a “voting hub”, featuring information on how to vote, and the brand is also donating all of the proceeds from a £78 ($78)sweatshirt emblazoned with the words “You’ve got the power” to the nonprofit.View image in fullscreen“Our voice is our power,” Lewinsky said in a statement released by the brand. “It’s pretty simple: Voting is using our voice to be heard and it’s the most defining – and powerful – aspect of democracy. Voting is always important, but the stakes are especially high this year, with voter frustration and apathy threatening to meaningfully impact turnout.”In the past, many fashion brands have distanced themselves from politics, fearing it would alienate shoppers. But in recent years they’ve had to change tactics to capture the attention of an ever-more politically engaged customer base. A 2020 study by Vogue Business found that more than half of Teen Vogue readers supported campaigns to encourage voting while 61% of readers believe fashion and beauty brands have a duty to address social issues. The next US presidential election will be crucial for young people born between the late 1990s and the early 2010s – with 40.8 million of them now eligible to vote.For those questioning whether 50-year-old Lewinsky resonates with today’s youth, a quick scroll through the comments section on Reformation’s Instagram page featuring statements such as “Chills. Screaming. Dying” and numerous users calling her “mother” suggest she does. Many reference her TedTalk about online shaming that has racked up more than 21m views.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionOver the next couple of months expect to see more brands engaging with politics but safely focusing on voter apathy rather than on endorsing a specific candidate. During the run-up to the 2020 US election, the luxury department store Saks Fifth Avenue set up voting registration at its flagship shop in New York, Ralph Lauren declared election day a company-wide holiday and Crocs released a “Vote” shoe charm. As Paris fashion week gets underway, could we see another “Vote” sweatshirt similar to the one Nicolas Ghesquière sent down the Louis Vuitton spring-summer 2021 catwalk? Or could Lewinsky be a new front-row favourite? Watch this space. More