Vanity Fair writer says MAGA style is ‘perversion of the past’

Vanity Fair contributor Robin Givhan, who won the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for criticism, has published a lengthy takedown of what she calls the “MAGA aesthetic,” arguing the movement has commandeered fashion to enforce rigid gender roles and a narrow, nostalgic vision of America.

The essay, headlined “Radical Chic: How the MAGA Movement Is Hijacking Style,” runs in Vanity Fair’s 2026 Style Issue, which the magazine unveiled this week with designer Marc Jacobs on the cover. The issue, which hits newsstands Tuesday, also includes a companion essay from Vanity Fair editorial director Mark Guiducci tracing the MAGA hat’s evolution from a joke item hipsters once wore ironically into what he calls a political dividing line.

Ms. Givhan, who spent more than two decades at The Washington Post, including as its fashion critic and later senior critic-at-large, opens her piece by describing a diplomatic luncheon in Washington’s Woodley Park neighborhood, where she says the crowd’s look made her feel as though decades of fashion progress had simply vanished. She goes on to argue the movement blends pageant culture, “tradwife” social media aesthetics and old Capitol Hill dress codes into what she calls “a perversion of the past.”

The essay singles out first lady Melania Trump as the movement’s stylistic center, crediting her French-born stylist, Herve Pierre, with shaping that image since 2016, and it takes aim at Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s physique-focused approach to the military and Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s barefoot sauna appearance with Kid Rock. Ms. Givhan also contrasts the public sympathy shown to Turning Point USA’s Erika Kirk with the treatment of Becca Good, the wife of Renee Good, a Minneapolis woman fatally shot by an ICE agent in January, as an example of who the movement extends empathy to and who it does not.

Throughout the piece, Ms. Givhan argues MAGA fashion prizes hyperfemininity for women and exaggerated bulk for men while rejecting body positivity and gender fluidity, and that the movement’s adherents pair populist rhetoric with closets full of Dolce & Gabbana, Christian Louboutin and Dior.

Mr. Guiducci’s companion essay has already drawn conservative pushback. The Media Research Center’s NewsBusters blog argued the MAGA cap has become “the most powerful article of fashion in history” and said Mr. Guiducci’s essay effectively conceded the point. The blog did not address Ms. Givhan’s essay.