The Sundress Scandal Rocking Trad Twitter

How one yellow sun dress threw various factions of right-wing Twitter into dissaray

If you follow this Substack, you’re probably on the left like me, and might have never seen this image before. So tell me, what do you see?

You probably see a yellow dress (correct!)

But there’s more to it than that. This is a new sun dress, sold by Evie Magazine, and touted by Evie founder Brittany Martinez (tongue-in-cheekily) as “fertility tech” and the answer to the declining birth rate. It’s supposed to be everything that men want in a dress, drawing on the oft-repeated male jokes about sun dresses being sexy, while providing the features that women want—namely, a built-in bra and pockets. The dress is listed for $130. Basically the sell is: women will feel comfortable and sexy in it, and men will find them sexy in it, and they’ll bone (consensually.)

So, what’s the big deal? Well, apparently, a lot, at least on the right. Wait a second, you. might be wondering. What on Earth does a dress have to do with the right? You’re about to find out.

At first I was afraid to write about this scandal because as a liberal (more specifically, a social democrat) I don’t have much skin in the game. I’m also not a subscriber of Evie Magazine, although I’m loosely familiar with it as I’ve followed a few of their writers on Twitter for some of their apolitical tweets around relationships, fashion and beauty (Yes, I follow people with whom I disagree politically!) Evie Magazine is, ostensibly, “right-leaning”, although not all their content is political. In fact, most isn’t. Some content from Evie could even be considered feminist, or at the very least, not anti-feminist. A quick stroll through the “Relationships” tab shows content that is nearly indistinguishable from what someone might have read in Cosmopolitan in the mid-2000s.

But, of course, Evie is at least somewhat right-leaning. Most people who write for Evie would probably identify as conservatives, or at least not liberals. But that’s part of what makes this scandal so fascinating. We no longer live in a country of clean lines distinguishing the left from the right. Fascinatingly to me, the “crunchy” lifestyle—extended breastfeeding, eschewing vaccine recommendations, babywearing, bedsharing and an emphasis on everything being natural and homemade—which was associated with liberal hippies just ten years ago—is now somewhat right-coded. Within “the right,” you have Never Trumpers, classic conservatives who might call themselves Republicans, along with the more anti-government, anti-establishment types who hold some views that might align with the far-left—and all of these people fiercely disagree with each other on many things.

On the left, we see so much infighting between traditional liberals and leftists (consider for a moment that Bill Maher and AOC probably cast the same vote in 2020) that we may forget the right is just as fractured, and just as confused, as we are. If you subscribe to The New York Times (unlike Evie, I actually am a NYT subscriber) you’ll see hand-wringing articles about how the left can’t agree on anything, and how liberals are being held hostage by an increasingly radical activist wing, yet desperate to appeal to the “median voter” who finds us more and more out of touch. Sundressgate gave us a sneek peak into the fact that the right is probably just as prone to drama as we are.