Photo by Anna Webber/Getty Images for Teen Vogue

The magazine industry is in mourning. This week, Condé Nast announced that Teen Vogue will be folded into its parent magazine Vogue, laying off six staffers, including its politics editor. Those less steeped in the media ecosystem may simply see this as another casualty of a fragile market. But it also represents an ideological turning point. Since 2016, Teen Vogue has pioneered a new approach to women’s media, explicitly integrating progressive politics and diversity – both in the newsroom and on the page – into its editorial policy. In-depth election coverage could be found next to profiles of pop stars and Met Gala best-dressed lists. It published articles like “How to Find an Accessible Chest Binder as a Disabled Trans Person” and “How to Get an Abortion if You’re a Teen”. Now it has been essentially shut down.

Jayme Franklin, founder and CEO of the Conservateur, thinks magazines “went off the rails” in 2016. They’d* *happily profile Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez or Hillary Clinton, but baulk at the idea of putting Melania Trump on the cover. Suddenly, the glamorous world of fashion journalism – the one Franklin had seen in films like *The Devil Wears Prada *and once dreamed of joining – seemed less inviting. “It was just so alienating,” she tells me over the phone. “I didn’t feel like it was a real representation and empowerment of all women – only women who are left-leaning.”

So, Franklin took matters into her own hands. Launched in 2020, her platform *The Conservateur publishes articles heralding Melania Trump’s style as the “cool-girl blueprint for Fall” in the same way that, say, Vogue might report on Julia Roberts wearing jeans on a night out. But beyond style stories, the politics are decidedly more overt than what you’d typically find in your average mainstream glossy – beyond Teen Vogue, you’d be hard pressed to find a publication that regularly commissions op-eds on government policies that don’t directly impact women’s rights. The Conservateur, however, *goes all in. A Charlie Kirk eulogy sits alongside features praising Trump’s policies, or essays on the virtues of marrying powerful men. “So many women across the country follow us because they’re like, ‘Finally, I’m getting some sound advice,’” says Franklin. “We just want women to live their best God-given lives.”

Dubbed “Vogue for Trumpers”, *The Conservateur *isn’t alone in its mission to pull women’s media to the right. Evie Magazine, launched in 2019, has built an audience of almost a quarter of a million Instagram followers and claims to be the fastest-growing women’s media publication in America. It describes itself as “the future of femininity” – an antidote to “mainstream culture that encourages women to engage in destructive behavior in the name of self-love and empowerment”. Evie’s content oscillates between lifestyle and ideology – one post pairing conservative-leaning wellness tips, the next dog-whistling far-right talking points.

Earlier this year, they glowingly profiled Liv Schmidt, a “SkinnyTok” influencer who was eventually banned from the platform. She’s since pivoted to a subscription-only Instagram model, where, according to the Cut, followers share advice and partake in challenges that promote disordered eating. *Evie *frames Schmidt as a heroic martyr: “still standing, still skinny”.

This pattern of sensational, moralised storytelling runs throughout their coverage. Anti-contraception stories are rife – take, “I Almost Died From My Birth Control”, for example, or “The Shocking Effects Of Different Birth Control On Divorce Rates”. (Evie’s founder Brittany Hugoboom also owns the Peter Thiel-back fertility-tracking app 28 Wellness.) Elsewhere, tips for becoming the perfect housewife span from the generally regressive (“Want Your Husband To Get You Pregnant? Cook Him These 10 Dishes”) to an op-ed discouraging women from acknowledging the unpaid labour that comes with being a housewife, pegged to Erika Kirk’s speech at her husband’s memorial service. “How degrading to view a wife and mother’s role in the home as something that is less important than a man’s office job,” writes Gina Florio. “How humiliating to sneer at a husband’s success because you aren’t being recognized in the same exact capacity.”

On social media, the content turns even more clickbait-y: thinspo clips of the Victoria Secret fashion show next to an interview snippet of Keira Knightley responding to a question about her involvement in the Harry Potter reboot despite calls to boycott JK Rowling, captioned, “Has the trans movement gone so far that even celebrities are done playing by its rules?”

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The rise of conservative women’s media isn’t a uniquely American phenomenon. In the UK, there’s The Conservative Woman, which aims to “challenge… virtue-signalling, intolerant and self-interested elites”, and claims to draw 1.5 million page views a month. Smaller outfits such as The Woman’s Safety Initiative run Substacks reporting on sexual offences allegedly perpetrated by immigrants, while influencers like Jasmine Darke and Estee Williams peddle the tradwife aesthetic. But none of it feels quite as glossy and seductive as the US iteration – at least not yet.

For what it’s worth, Hugoboom doesn’t consider her publication’s views to be alt-right. “Journalists invent labels daily to demean women,” she tells me. “Women aren’t binary. We are a magazine for women who want truth, beauty and romance.” And she has a clear vision for who those women are. “The *Evie *girl reads Pride and Prejudice and listens to Lana Del Rey. She’s exceptionally beautiful, virtuous and extremely romantic. She’ll reach for a feminine dress over a pantsuit. She loves men and loves being a woman.” Evie’s most recent print edition starred Hannah Neeleman, AKA Ballerina Farm, the tradwife influencer with millions of followers, who films herself making meals from scratch for her eight children on her 70-acre ranch.

*Evie *and The *Conservateur *epitomise two distinct strands of conservative femininity. The former caters more to “the angel in the house” trope, full of advice on how to be a good mother and wife (articles containing sex tips are pointedly aimed at married women), at times slipping into conspiracy theory territory through anti-vax and birth control rhetoric framed as health and wellness content. The Conservateur instead targets the city girl, ambitious women with “a traditional mindset” – not unlike Franklin, who worked at the White House for six months towards the end of Trump’s first term.

But ultimately, both magazines do the same thing, borrowing the aesthetics of mainstream glossy magazines to push political ideologies that, at best, reject feminism and overcorrect liberal values and, at worst, veer into extremist territory. They exist within the broader online “womansphere”, where tradwife and Maha (Make America Healthy Again) influencers frame regressive feminine ideals as a corrective to “wokeness” and the “radical left”. Yet while they reject the politics of mainstream magazines, they use its structures and formats to legitimise what might otherwise be considered fringe ideologies.

The *Conservateur *enjoyed a follower boost after two major political events. “When Trump was elected, we gained, like, 40,000 followers on Instagram in one night,” says Franklin. “We’ve also had huge growth after the assassination of Charlie Kirk. People were looking for guidance during this extremely tragic time – it really pushed people towards our position on a lot of issues.”

Even more revealing is a line in the press materials I’m sent about The Conservateur’s newly-launched podcast Simply American, hosted by Franklin and her best friend Camryn Kinsey: “We saw in 2024 how effective podcasting was to win over young men to the conservative cause, but no one has effectively replicated this for young women.” The goal here isn’t just to make conservative women feel seen and heard in mainstream media; it’s to actively convert young women to their cause, using fashion, beauty and lifestyle content as the gateway drug.

“Modern feminism is unpopular and cringe. But if women like it, there are other magazines to read like [left-wing US women’s magazine] Jezebel,” says Hugoboom. Evie claims to be the fastest-growing women’s media publication in America, and they’re accelerating that market dominance by stoking “us-vs-them” division. On the day that *Glamour *magazine reveals Demi Moore as their first “Woman of the Year” for 2025, *Evie reposts the cover image captioned “A woman is finally on the cover of ‘Woman of the Year’”, with a slide show of magazine covers featuring trans women – none of them from Glamour’s “*Woman of the Year” campaigns.

Unsurprisingly, *Evie *has also gleefully posted about Teen Vogue’s shuttering, using a cover story on Vivian Wilson, Elon Musk’s estranged trans daughter, to illustrate their point. “I can’t believe a magazine dedicated to radicalizing teen girls and teaching them about period magic, Karl Marx, and leftist politics is finally shutting down,” reads the caption. “Who could’ve ever seen this coming?”

[Further reading: How Guy Fawkes became the patron saint of British fascism]

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