ISSUE 22 : FROM TRAD WIVES TO TRUMP

did you see this coming? trends are political, because everything is

If you subscribe to this newsletter (and are a U.S. resident), I’m presuming you’re probably still feeling some mix of existential dread, grief, anxiety, frustration, nihilism, and/or anger relating to last week’s election. Were you surprised by the result? I wasn’t. Disappointed, yes, and all those other emotions, but I saw it coming. As

Kamili

explains, there were plenty of cultural indicators:

I don’t think I’ve shared much about my career here, but I’m a trend forecaster and brand strategist with particular expertise in fashion and beauty. Tracking cultural signals is my job, but you didn’t need to study foresight to notice these - the signs were everywhere. Tradwives, cottagecore, stay-at-home girlfriends: the surging fascination with and idealization of regressive portrayals of womanhood and femininity over the past two years foretold our current moment. So why were so many people shocked by Trump winning of the popular vote?

@khateu#girlmath #stayathomegirlfriend #girldinner #homesteading

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I had a great dialogue with Kamili in Substack notes and explained my perspective: I don’t think people didn’t see the signs - we’re not blind or oblivious. But many of us actively chose to ignore the conservative undertones because they made us uncomfortable. Some chose to pretend that these micro-trends were innocuous or trivial, while others thought it’d be harmless to elevate them as quirky or aspirational. The internet’s favorite tradwife, Nara Smith, insisted “It’s really not that deep,” and landed features with GQ, Marc Jacobs, and Aritzia. Meanwhile, her husband recently reposted a video celebrating Trump’s win.

We let our biases inform our worldview because it is easier and makes us feel better. We didn’t take the influence and implications of these trends seriously because it would have been difficult and unsettling. It would have forced us to contend with the fact that championing progressive values was suddenly swimming against the cultural current, rather than with it. I run into these sorts of tensions a lot when applying trends to brand strategy. I prefer presenting concepts that I believe offer positive contributions towards the sort of world that I want to live in.

When things like tradwives are trending, I don’t dwell on them in my reporting and tend to position them as fringe topics so that they are dismissed as inconsequential. That’s because I don’t want any brand I work with to be promoting something that I consider problematic or even questionable. But, technically, this means I’m not doing my job properly. I know that I’m not alone in this. It’s somewhat of an unspoken consensus in the trend forecasting and brand strategy worlds. WGSN is one of the biggest trend agencies in the world, with tens of thousands of reports on its website, and a cursory search of their database delivers (2) minor results for the term tradwife/tradwives.

One of my favorite trend forecasters,

Matt Klein

, wrote a fantastic piece in 2022 providing a framework to de-bias trend research and ensure that we are not ignoring cultural signals due to our personal biases:

But I don’t believe Klein’s intent with this framework was to bring attention to to conservative ideologies. Instead, it was meant to promote recognition of overlooked and marginalized perspectives: “Mindfulness of blind-spots, a willingness to both challenge and expand upon worldviews, and respect with interrogation, are the imperative and often missing traits required to more comprehensively grasp the zeitgeist and author a preferred future.” Most people (at least those I know) enter these fields because they love the idea of contributing towards building a better future or bringing progressive culture to the masses. So what do strategists do when culture starts to feel regressive? Many tend to avoid the signs, until they can no longer be ignored, and then advise brands on making subtle adjustments to adapt to the current cultural reality without completely unravelling progress.

There’s a reason why, unlike in 2020, most brands did not share progressive, feminist, or inclusivity-focused content, or even ‘get out the vote’ content, around this election - instead, they just went silent on social for a couple of days. It’s the same reason why many businesses have stopped or slowed down their public pursuit of DEI goals, even if they continue to pursue these privately because their employees demand it. These decisions are not made in a vacuum. Brand executives were aware that the cultural climate had shifted in a conservative direction. And if brand strategists knew, then shouldn’t political strategists also have known?

I am not suggesting that these cultural micro-trends described above are indicative of majority cultural sentiment or are, by any means, a primary reason why Trump won this election. However, I do think that they indicated a growing willingness to concede progressive values and embrace conservative norms, i.e. maybe being a stay-at-home girlfriend isn’t so bad after all, especially if it means [inflation goes down or insert issue here]. Most American women (64%) and white adults (60%) believe abortion should be legal in all/most instances. And yet a majority of white women (53%) voted for Trump - essentially deciding that securing their bodily autonomy wasn’t actually that important, in the grand scheme of things. Clearly, the pundits got something wrong here - the conservative cultural shift was a key blindspot.

I don’t personally know any political strategists. I’m not sure if they totally missed these cultural signals, or if they just severely underestimated their influence and implications. It’s tempting to dismiss trends as inconsequential. Especially if they relate to fashion, beauty, women, or other silly things like that. But trends are political, because everything is.