Conservative magazine editors pull back the curtain on how fashion has been coded ‘left-wing’ politically

Combating “uglification,” conservative entrepreneurs spoke to politically “coded” facets of society amid their own efforts to make style accessible for the right.

“… we want to get more women on our side …”

Where once political disagreements had left friends agreeing to disagree, the modern climate has demonstrated little more than extremes as even liking something tangentially related to a figure like President Donald Trump — say Elon Musk’s Teslas — found some family refusing to talk to one another.

Now, as the Democratic Party sought inroads to attract young males to their base, The Conservateur founder and CEO Jayme Leagh Franklin spoke with Fox News Digital about how aspects of culture have been “coded” and what her fashion magazine was doing to bring women to the right.

“I think there’s been an uglification, whether you see modern art or you see progressives kind of pushing onto women [to] reject men, dye your hair blue and wear a septum piercing,” she told reporter Joshua Q. Nelson.

Thank you @FoxNews & @joshuaqnelson for featuring @ConservateurMag pic.twitter.com/pgOgEiNDqD

— Jayme Leagh Franklin (@jaymefranklin16) June 6, 2025

The entrepreneur who’d survived a college education at the University of California, Berkeley without being indoctrinated had referenced her Catholic upbringing and said, “… we want to get more women on our side, because I do believe our lifestyle, whether it be getting married, having a family, working hard in your job, and loving this country, and going to church … I think makes for a more successful and happier life for women.”

Adding her own insight, The Conservateur editor-in-chief Caroline Downey commented on how podcasts featuring male hosts are deemed “right-wing” because they are “fundamentally irreverent.”

“They weren’t policing words, and they were also fundamentally trying to pursue truth. Joe Rogan gets a lot of criticism for platforming controversial figures, but his podcast style has always been the same, which is to ask questions of people who know more than him on a specific subject and to just have stimulating conversations,” she said. “That alone was considered provocative during a cancel culture, very word policing time when you were supposed to just take the propaganda from the Democratic Party and accept it. So just free discourse on these podcasts, just speaking in an unfiltered way, is unfortunately right-wing coded.”

“I think the coding is a natural byproduct of the fact that leftism has infiltrated and hijacked most institutions in our culture, including fashion editorial and fashion production,” Downey went on in the wake of an interview with The New York Times where Emma Goldberg discussed how everything was being labeled as “coded” in some way now as politics became the lens through which all society was viewed.

“If we have a coded brand, that is meeting the moment for many young women who don’t feel comfortable or necessarily welcomed by what is already available on the market,” added the editor-in-chief.

Meanwhile, Franklin brought up a previous campaign and said, “We started our Make America Hot Again hat … Obviously, it’s a fun hat that was so popular for us that people loved.”

“But it does touch on a bigger thing. We say at The Conservateur, we are all about being our best self.  That’s what we’re promoting to women,” she asserted.