Have Conservatives Taken Sexy Back?
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.
Evie isn’t alone in offering belated sex ed for the religious right. I came across a website called christianfriendlysexpositions.com, which claims to have introduced twenty million couples to “sex poses and sensual tips diagramed and described in a tasteful, God-honoring, marriage-focused manner.” Lingerie is a popular topic in this very specific corner of the internet. The Christian blogger Phylicia Masonheimer has extolled the virtues of lingerie showers. “We gathered around the bride, laid hands on her shoulders and prayed for the power of God to cover her marriage, to bless her union, to encompass her sexuality,” she reported on her blog, “Every Woman a Theologian,” adding, “I am deeply saddened when women are awkward at parties like this.” And there are new lingerie brands that cater to the God-fearing garter-belt enthusiast, such as Ginger & Peach (“All we do is bathed in prayer,” its owner promises) and Mentionables, a Mormon-owned company whose product photos are model-free so that your husband can peruse them without “feeling guilty for checking out other women,” according to its website. There were limits, though, to the right’s new sex positivity. A podcast for Christian couples called “The Naked Marriage” warned against the spouse-replacing perils of using a sex toy: “Like seasoning on a steak, it should enhance the experience, not become the meal itself.”
But it turns out that the right doesn’t need purity culture to reboot the policies that went along with it. In June, the Department of Health and Human Services began withdrawing federal grants from nonprofits that had received money through the Teenage Pregnancy Prevention Program. Going forward, the agency said, funding would be restricted to organizations that prioritized “abstinence-until-marriage-only ‘sexual risk avoidance’ ” education. But H.H.S. defunded some of those programs as well. Organizations using an abstinence-only curriculum called “Love Notes,” developed by the Dibble Institute, in Berkeley—which teaches “relationship skills” to teens—were defunded because of a module on the harms of pornography; H.H.S. flagged the material for promoting pornography. (Some suspected that the agency had relied on A.I. for the audit.)
Hugoboom insisted that she wasn’t a hard-liner. She didn’t see, for instance, how her opposition to the COVID vaccine was any different from “L.A. liberal girls” avoiding microplastics. “People in the comments called us alt-right,” she said. “It was so weird.” Inside “The Sex Issue” was a graphic that read “Body Count? One. Orgasms? Countless.” Was Evie against premarital sex? “We’re not taking a stance,” Hugoboom replied. “We do focus on a healthy sex life when you’re married. What’s the one thing that you can do that you can’t do with your friends?” I laughed, telling her that, in Brooklyn, it wasn’t unheard of for a married friend to ask you out for coffee and then let you know, in case you were interested, that they were opening their relationship. She asked whether that had ever happened to me. I confessed that it had. “That would freak me out,” she said. “I would die.”
After lunch, we visited the Madison Avenue outpost of Agent Provocateur, the British lingerie brand. Evie publishes shopping guides for the #MyBodyHisChoice customer, such as “The Valentine’s Lingerie He Hopes You’ll Wear.” We were greeted by the store manager, Samantha, who was wearing the A.P. uniform—a tight pink Vivienne Westwood minidress—as well as stockings with the words “whip me, bite me, eat me, tease me” stitched into the back seam. The bridal section had fewer items in white than I was expecting. That made sense to Hugoboom: “I was a virgin on my wedding night, but a lot of brides aren’t.” Samantha and I went silent. I pointed to a mannequin’s torso that was covered in an elaborate network of crystal chains. “This would be more for, like, a play party,” Samantha explained. “Here we go again,” Hugoboom remarked.
Samantha asked whether we would like a fitting. This was tempting. I had never been professionally measured for a bra, but I was worried about being in my underwear with a source. “You should! It’ll be fun,” Hugoboom said. I told Samantha that I thought I was a 36B. She eyed my chest and said no, I was most likely a 34D. I explained that this wasn’t possible—if I were a D cup, I would have lived an entirely different life.
She brought me one of their latest designs—the Clarette, a navy-blue lace balconette push-up bra—in my new size and had me try it on. It was so ostentatiously sultry that I knew I could never tell anyone who had critiqued “the male gaze” in a college essay what I really thought of it. When I emerged from the fitting room, Hugoboom squealed. “You look insane!” she said. I agreed, but I used a different term.
We left the store, sans bra. (It cost two hundred and fifty-five dollars.) Hugoboom seemed sad. “You looked really hot in that bra,” she told me as we said our goodbyes. “I don’t mean that in a lesbian way,” she added.
T hroughout its history, lingerie has gotten tangled up in politics. If the story of women’s liberation is often told as one long unlacing of the corset, an early salvo came from the French barricades. During the Paris Commune of 1871, a socialist tailor named Herminie Cadolle experimented with corset design in the hope of allowing women to move around more freely and, presumably, evade the gendarmes. The Commune lasted just seventy-two days, but the corselet-gorge, a chest covering with straps which Cadolle later developed, has been called one of the first modern bras. Later that century, suffragettes on both sides of the Atlantic took up the cause of dress reform; corsets could be replaced by sleeveless vests sold in specialty catalogues as “emancipation waists.” In 1896, the journalist Nellie Bly reported that one attendee at a suffragette meeting in Washington, D.C., was “corsetless, and, I fear, petticoatless!”
By the nineteen-thirties, corsets had gone out of style among women of all political stripes, but, if whale boning couldn’t contain the fairer sex, advertising would. A company called Maidenform—named to distinguish its cupped bra from the boyish bandeau popularized by flappers—launched its “I Dreamed” campaign in 1949. “I dreamed I was a lady editor in my Maidenform girdle,” read an ad showing a woman in a “Bi-line glamour girdle” juggling telephones. Another, from 1953, featured a woman in a fireman’s helmet, a hoop skirt, and the era’s signature bullet bra, saying, “I’m the chief and the siren.” Working was always presented as a fantasy scenario; men home from the war needed their jobs back, after all. The campaign eventually earned a place in the Smithsonian and an episode on “Mad Men” in which Don Draper is tasked with devising a competing bra ad for Playtex. (“I find they both open easily,” the account man Ken Cosgrove offers.)
In 1968, bras got their biggest political stage yet when a group of women’s liberationists protested the Miss America pageant in Atlantic City by dumping bras, pots and pans, and copies of Playboy—all of which they called “instruments of female torture”—into a trash can marked “Freedom.” Art Buchwald, the Washington Post humorist, wrote a mocking column titled “The Bra Burners.” Though the group didn’t actually light any matches, the image stuck. Critics leapt at the chance to cast feminists as prudes and housewives as vixens. In 1973, Marabel Morgan advised readers of her self-help book for Christian housewives, “The Total Woman”—which went on to sell ten million copies—to greet their husbands at the door dressed as “a pixie or a pirate, a cowgirl or a showgirl.” A rumor spread that she had even suggested wives open the door wearing nothing but Saran Wrap. (The idea was spoofed in the 1991 film “Fried Green Tomatoes”: Kathy Bates’s character, a shy housewife, puts on sandwich wrap to surprise her husband, who responds, “Have you gone insane?”)
In the late eighties and early nineties, it was men’s underwear that became politically weighted, as religious leaders blamed the “gay life style” for the spread of H.I.V. Calvin Klein plastered posters of men in tight white boxer briefs, a gay fetish object, on billboards and bus stops. “The best protection against AIDS is to keep your Calvins on,” the rapper Marky Mark teased in a 1992 commercial from the era. Sex was dangerous, conservatives said, so Madonna, an L.G.B.T.Q. ally, fired back with a satin bullet bra designed by Jean Paul Gaultier, which she wore during her 1990 Blond Ambition tour. In England, women calling themselves “ladettes” were similarly rejecting Thatcherism and adopting bawdy behaviors: heavy drinking, swearing, wearing bras out in public. Then, in February of 1994, a billboard appeared in Piccadilly Circus, showing the model Eva Herzigová in a black Wonderbra, which seemed to rival NASA in its gravity-defying technology; the ad was captioned, simply, “Hello Boys.” When the Wonderbra came to New York City that May, demand was so high that the first shipment arrived at Macy’s in an armored vehicle. The Times wrote, “The New York woman knows what she wants. She wants rent control, good restaurants, a seat on the subway and—apparently—better cleavage.”
But times have changed, or so I heard on an episode of “Hello Girls,” a 2023 podcast about the history of underwear, co-hosted by the fashion journalists Emily Cronin and Kate Finnegan. The two devoted an episode to reëxamining the Wonderbra’s legacy in light of recent events. “Donald Trump happened. MeToo happened. Jeffrey Epstein happened. . . . So how does an advert that shows a thin white woman offering her boobs up for the boys look to us now?” Cronin asks. Then someone introduced as a “Gen Z fashion consultant” responds, quite forcefully, “It’s so disgusting. It’s almost embarrassing to think at some point a woman looked at that and was, like, ‘Oh, gosh, yeah. I need to get that same bra.’ ”
I’m not a fashion journalist. I wasn’t a journalist at all at the start of #MeToo. In 2016, I had recently finished grad school, and the only question I was asking myself when shopping for underwear was where the clearance bin was. But, while reporting this story, I learned that the estimated hundred-billion-dollar lingerie industry had apparently experienced #MeToo as an existential crisis. A 2018 article in The Hollywood Reporter asked “Did #MeToo Kill the Push-Up Bra?” after sales of the style declined by forty-five per cent during the previous year. The article stopped short of a definitive yes, but it suggested that, “with women redefining what’s ‘sexy’ outside the bounds of the male gaze, and feminism driving the fashion conversation,” #MeToo had “likely played a role.”
That a newer item—the bralette—had been flooding the market since 2014 seemed a likelier explanation, but a narrative had formed that women were enlisting their undies in the fight against the patriarchy. Other articles—“Victoria’s Secret? In 2018, Fewer Women Want to Hear It,” “Lingerie looks for a new bottom line after #MeToo”—followed. Sarah Shotton, the creative director of Agent Provocateur, recalled marketing meetings in which people said, “ ‘We can’t talk about sex anymore because of what’s happened.’ I said, ‘If we can’t be sexy, we’re not Agent Provocateur.’ ” (She hired the filmmaker Charlotte Wales to shoot a commercial with female Olympians in A.P. lingerie getting hot and sweaty—from exercise.) “There was just, like, a microscope on everything,” Jennifer Zuccarini, the founder of the lingerie brand Fleur du Mal, said, echoing Shotton’s recollection. Fleur du Mal released a behind-the-scenes photo from 2017 of a male photographer standing over a female model to take a shot. “People were, like, ‘He’s dominating her.’ I’m, like, ‘Oh, my God, he’s just a photographer getting a photo. This is crazy,’ ” Zuccarini said.
There was a feeling among the female founders and executives I spoke to that they were cleaning up a mess made by men. After the Victoria’s Secret fashion show came under fire in 2018, reports emerged of a close friendship between the company’s owner, Les Wexner, and Jeffrey Epstein. Using that relationship, Epstein had posed as a talent scout for the brand, luring young women to his hotel room under the pretext of auditions. Then, in 2020, the Times reported that multiple women had accused Ed Razek, who cast the Angels, of sexual harassment (accusations he deemed “categorically untrue, misconstrued or taken out of context”).
Lingerie brands across the industry entered a phase of penitent marketing. Aerie, American Eagle’s underwear line, announced a capsule collection with the Olympic gymnast and sexual-assault survivor Aly Raisman, fifteen per cent of whose proceeds would go to a nonprofit combatting child sexual abuse (though only up to seventy-five thousand dollars). Kim Kardashian launched her shapewear company, SKIMS, in 2019, and its first model was Alice Marie Johnson, a formerly incarcerated woman whose case Kardashian had publicized. And Parade, one of the many female-led direct-to-consumer brands that entered the underwear market during #MeToo, included a donation button on its website’s checkout page; the company later told The Cut that those customer donations had covered, among other things, “twelve weeks of therapy for Black women.” Even Emily of “Emily in Paris” was stumped, last season, when she had to come up with a campaign for the Italian lingerie brand Intimissimi. “We see a couple kissing passionately. She starts to take off her lingerie, but he stops her,” she tells a room of executives. “The lingerie is so beautiful it takes center stage.” The Italians look on, confused.
Had the right sensed an opening in all this hesitation? Sarah Leonard, the editor-in-chief of Lux, a socialist-feminist magazine that has covered sexual harassment and labor abuses in the fashion industry (and which I’ve contributed to), believes that this era of corporate advertising produced a useful caricature of liberal causes, not unlike the fictitious bra burners of yore. “The right conflated the left with dumb, progressive-lite marketing to sell underwear. It was fuel for them, and it did nothing for us,” she told me. Moira Donegan, a writer who, in 2017, created a crowdsourced spreadsheet naming men who’d been accused of sexual misconduct which became known as the Shitty Media Men list, said she found it frustrating that #MeToo is so often remembered this way. “We were asking that sexual harassment not be a precondition to accessing public life,” she told me. “It was not about wanting to see fewer bikinis on billboards.” But in America it can be hard to know your opponent from the version of them that’s been molded into a consumer base. (Coachella and Stagecoach, for example, are owned by the same Republican billionaire, Philip Anschutz, who has donated to anti-abortion groups.)
Women do consider lingerie political, but their concerns aren’t always the ones that companies want to advertise. The gothic-inflected lingerie brand Thistle and Spire, popular with romantasy readers, received blowback after its latest line was revealed to have used A.I.-generated designs, pushing the company to reverse course. At the Rack Shack, a bra store in Bushwick I visited, sex workers get a fifteen-per-cent discount for such items as “smart pasties,” which can be tapped with a phone to tip the wearer. A rep from the gender-inclusive brand tomboyx, which sells boxer briefs lined with blood-absorbing material, told me that a customer once e-mailed to say, “Your underwear saved my life.”
Some consumers maintain an old-school view of lingerie’s core objective. At a pop-up in Nolita for Cou Cou, a “clean girl” underwear line whose products are almost entirely compostable, I met a thirty-three-year-old tourist from Houston named Chloe. Her reasons for shopping at Cou Cou weren’t exactly ideological. “I’m not going to buy La Perla just to hang out at home,” she told me, referring to the luxury lingerie label. “I don’t have a man. Cou Cou is a good in-between.” She went on, “You can wear it out to a club, and, on the off chance you go home with someone, you have this on, not your old Hanes period-stained underwear. I’m not saying this is a true story.”
In July, I travelled to Bologna, Italy, to visit what I had started thinking of as the Vatican of lingerie. This was the atelier of La Perla, which was founded in 1954 by the corset-maker Ada Masotti. She sought to apply the most sophisticated methods and fabrics, usually reserved for dresses or veils, to women’s undergarments: frastaglio (hand-sewn embroidery on tulle), silk soutache (ornate braided trims), and Leavers lace (woven on a specialized English loom). Masotti called the last of these “the fabric of desire.” She delivered her items to the wives of Bologna’s élite in red-velvet boxes like those used for jewelry.
Over the decades, La Perla became the uniform of screen sirens. It is thought that Sophia Loren wore one of its bustiers for her famous striptease scene in “Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow” (1963), opposite Marcello Mastroianni. Daniel Craig sported a pair of baby-blue La Perla swim trunks on a beach in the Bahamas in “Casino Royale” (2006). I first heard of the brand as a teen while watching the reality show “Newlyweds: Nick and Jessica” (2003), in which Jessica Simpson calls her husband, Nick Lachey, to confess that she “accidentally” ran up a bill of more than seven hundred dollars at La Perla. “You gotta look at price tags before you pay, babe,” he told her. (The pair separated two years later.)
Hoping to retire one day, I wasn’t at La Perla to shop. I wanted to meet the company’s seamstresses—known as le perline, or “the little pearls”—who saved their own jobs after a Bologna court declared the company insolvent in 2024. In 2007, Masotti’s son had sold the company to the San Francisco-based private-equity firm JH Partners. After two subsequent sales, Brexit-related tax issues, and a series of risky investments by its latest owner, the company had gone bankrupt.
Bologna is nicknamed La Rossa, or “the Red One,” in reference to both its terra-cotta rooftops and long history of leftist politics; the Italian Communist Party governed the city from 1945 to 1991. In 2025, le perline protested in Piazza Maggiore under a red banner shaped like a bra and petitioned the European Parliament. “We denounce the predatory practices of speculative finance, which sacrifice the real economy for immediate profit,” they wrote in a manifesto. “We are fighting for the survival of a company founded by a pioneer of women’s entrepreneurship.” In a resolution, the Italian government negotiated a sale to the American billionaire Peter Kern, formerly of Expedia, and required the reinstatement of two hundred employees. (Kern’s wife was reportedly a fan of the brand.)
From my hotel, just off Via Antonio Gramsci, I set off for the factory alongside my interpreter, a Welsh woman named Glesni Williams. We arrived at a hunter-green building with huge windows and shaded porticoes. It had been designed by Pier Luigi Cervellati in 1972, to maximize worker comfort. In the lobby was a twenty-foot-wide poster, from 2017, of Kendall Jenner in a fuchsia lace bodysuit. (Earlier that year, she had posed for the company in front of a burning bra and shattered glass.)
We were met by Anne d’Ambrosio, the company’s head of communications, who invited me to preview the fall collection, the brand’s first since reopening; the inspiration was the legacy of La Perla itself. I was introduced to Stefania Lonati, the house archivist, who had been pulling old samples and advertising materials for the designers. I asked if I could see Sophia Loren’s bustier. Lonati looked pained. “We don’t know where it is,” she confessed. As it should be, I thought. Upstairs, I browsed the collection, which included a nightgown embellished with the brand’s signature La Maison lace embroidery, giving the appearance of flowers winding up the décolleté. It was being paired with a shimmery chrome silk. “In the blue, it looks like liquid on you,” D’Ambrosio said. “This is innovation.”
D’Ambrosio led me across the factory floor, where le perline were back at their stations. We entered an alcove. There were what looked like enormous bullets lined up on a shelf. (They were used, I learned, to create the molds for bra cups.) A worker named Vincenza placed a triangle of fabric on a machine labelled “Watch Your Hands.” Next, we walked over to the embroidery department, where a woman in her sixties named Pina was using a magnifying glass as she sewed tiny pearls onto a lace bra. Pina had been a leader in Unicheunite (“Unique United”), the association le perline formed to resist the factory’s closure. “We took to the streets,” she told me, “to prove that this is who we are.” Every La Perla piece is “ ‘unique’ because it’s made by hand,” she explained, “not by machine.”
I had found the impossible—ethical consumption under capitalism. The politics of lingerie must stem from the labor conditions that produced it, right? SKIMS may purport to offer “solutions for every body,” but it scored the lowest possible marks in a 2024 accountability report from the watchdog group Remake, for its lack of transparency about its working conditions and environmental impact. As we left, Williams, who also works for Cineteca di Bologna, the film archive and restoration center, mentioned that there was an archiving push across Italy because of an initiative, under Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, of the right-wing Brothers of Italy party, to protect Italian cultural heritage. This may have also played a part in saving La Perla. The right was trying to co-opt sexy here, too, it seemed. Even at the Vatican of lingerie, nothing was sacred.
Back in New York, I found a package waiting for me: a small pink box from Agent Provocateur. I opened it and was face to face with the Clarette again. “You can’t be a D Cup and not have this bra,” the note said. It was signed “Brittany.” I didn’t know what to make of the fact that the only person who had ever gifted me lingerie was the editor of a magazine that had just published an article titled “Dear Men, Please Stop Drinking Beer. It’s Making You Effeminate and Infertile.” In the end, I guess it didn’t bother her that I was unmarried. As I grudgingly put it back in the box to be returned (journalistic ethics), I found it a relief to know that everyone was having trouble living their politics. ♦