EXPLAINED: People look vote maga actually dont | Rare Historical Photos

Even experts from the renowned fashion magazine Vanity Fair agree that the MAGA movement is hijacking style. "Girls wear pink. Boys wear blue. Everything else is noise,” wrote Vanity Fair's Robin Givhan. Meanwhile, NPR describes the typical MAGA look as dramatic eyeliner, long, wavy hair, sheath dresses - for women, anyway.

"It’s an exaggerated performance of traditional gender norms so common among the women of Trumpworld that it’s known as 'Mar-a-Lago face.' It may involve Botox, cheek implants, fake eyelashes, injected lips, glossy waves, and a surfeit of bronzer," adds culture magazine The Meteor.

The publication goes on to list DHS Secretary Kristi Noem, strategist Kimberly Guilfoyle, and former RNC chair Lara Trump, as those sporting the over-the-top MAGA look.

But the MAGA look isn't reserved for women.

"Pete Hegseth, to me, is the male equivalent of Kristi Noem," says journalist and editor Inae Oh. "Men like him wear these bright-colored blue suits that don’t just fade into the background, and are supposed to be a sign of patriotism. Their shoulders are extremely broad, whether that is natural or not. Their chins, their jaws are very chiseled."

According to Oh, the MAGA look is about stereotypical gender norms.

Oh calls it an "aggressive, cartoonish" way to represent gender norms, adding that it's very much about money, power, and who wears the pants.

“What we’re seeing with something like Mar-a-Lago face is a swing back toward [an era of plastic surgery when] people can tell that people have had work done,” says Alka Menon, a professor of sociology at Yale University.

Oh believes that the MAGA look among women shouldn't come as too much of a surprise. "[It's] consistent with the conservative movement’s decades-old willingness to embrace women’s rights—up to a point," writes the senior news and engagement editor at Mother Jones.

And, she argues, to hold some power, while still bowing down to a male king on the throne.

In an editorial published in the Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies, Henry A. Giroux writes that the most revealing thing about the MAGA aesthetic is its "studied ugliness."

The American-Canadian scholar and cultural critic argues that the whole look turns femininity itself into a badge of cruelty. He mentions plastic smiles, puffy lips, lacquered beach-wave hair, sharpened jawlines, and more, masquerading as traditional values.

And like others, his criticism isn't reserved for women only. Giroux notes that MAGA men are all over TikTok, YouTube, X, and other platforms, and likens them to a fever dream of authoritarian masculinity.

"They present themselves as strongmen-in-training: squared jaws clenched in permanent hostility, hyper-muscular bodies forged in gym rituals that double as moral theater, libidinal excess mistaken for strength, and rigid, armored postures that signal domination rather than confidence," writes the expert. "Their movements are stiff and rehearsed, bodies disciplined into what Wilhelm Reich once called 'crippling body armor,' where repression congeals into aggression and vulnerability is converted into cruelty."

Giroux believes that the MAGA look isn't only about style, but rather about power and violence. He says it comes across in the men's posture, gaze, and gesture.

"Clenched fists, growling stares, and exaggerated physical presence rehearse domination as a way of being in the world," Giroux explains. "Misogyny and hostile sexism are not simply beliefs but bodily dispositions, ways of standing, moving, and occupying space that render women, queer bodies, migrants, and the 'weak' as threats to be neutralized rather than human beings to be encountered."

Even across the pond in Europe, people have been been discussing the MAGA aesthetic. An article in The Parliament Magazine notes that while Europe's far right have embraced MAGA politics, thankfully, the Mar-a-Lago face has not yet arrived on the continent. And that might be because, as some experts argue, beauty is “not a requirement for power” in Europe. 

“Everybody is attracted to beauty,” says Moustapha Hamdi, head of the department of plastic surgery at the University Clinic of Brussels. “But I don’t think that our society is looking for this model of leadership.”