Where they align, however, is on the concept of “intention,” which requires effort and consideration of the people you’ll encounter in whatever outfit you put on your body that day.
“I just had our first baby nine months ago,” Wheeler says, noting that these days, sweatpants are an ever-present temptation. “I just had to grapple more with the fact of, how do I want to present myself, first to my husband, but to my kids as well?”
Says English, “at the end of the day, a lot of this”—what we wear—”is [seen] through the male gaze. You want to make sure that you’re a flower blooming for you as much as for the outside world.”
We pivot the conversation to makeup and cosmetic procedures as they relate to presenting oneself. English says she doesn’t wear lipstick, and in relation to cosmetic enhancements, hasn’t “had anything done.”
“I was a little intimidated to come because I’m a seven in Kansas City,” she says. “I’m a hard five in D.C.”
How does a party about making a country “hot again” come to be? That’s just one of the questions I posed to Jayme Franklin, The Conservateur’s 27-year-old co-founder, two days before the event took place in April this year.
Franklin, a Bay Area native, founded The Conservateur after graduating from UC Berkeley in 2020. She cites early fashion blogs, like Jules Sariñana’s Sincerely, Jules, and digital media brands like Gwyneth Paltrow’s Goop, as her gateways into the all-encompassing lifestyle space. However, as diverse as the women’s media ecosystem is, “there was just nothing that was specifically catered towards the conservative Christian, traditional-leaning woman,” she says.
“I would say this about TC—yes, we get involved with politics, it gets a lot of clicks and a lot of excitement, and we’ve definitely done a lot of profiles with women involved in the Trump administration, yada yada. But I actually think our culture is the most important part of our magazine,” she says.
The Conservateur’s culture coverage tackles dating, etiquette, and career, as well as fashion and beauty, through the lens of Christian conservatism, which is at odds with “more of this feminist, progressive lifestyle” Franklin says is championed by mainstream media. By contrast, she says, The Conservateur is “bringing back traditional femininity and the whole lifestyle attached to that as well.”
I asked her to elaborate on this idea of “traditional femininity,” and was surprised when she cited the recent past as a time when our cultural understanding of beauty was, as she says, more universal, or true.
“I think [traditional beauty] is just what beauty was before, like a decade ago,” she says. “There is just common beauty that we know. I think of the ’90s supermodels or the ’80s supermodels as well, like the Cindy Crawford type, and that’s what I think people want to see now.”
According to Franklin, readers aren’t getting that from women’s magazines like Vogue, or Glamour. “They’re trying to take things that are just what everybody knows are ugly and trying to make it like they’re good,” she continues, “and we’re kind of the antithesis to that.