Marketing Monica Lewinsky
Reformation uses a beloved icon of redemption to remind women to vote—but, really, sell the feeling of it.
This week, the fashion brand Reformation launched a buzzy campaign with Monica Lewinsky to sell clothes and ostensibly remind women to vote. On the company’s website, Lewinsky is pictured in a bold cherry-red ensemble while striking a power pose. “You’ve got the power,” reads the accompanying text. “Just ask Monica Lewinsky.” Click through and you’ll find Lewinsky in various business-leaning outfits, looking chic, beautiful, and self-possessed. In several shots, she’s shown in an office with C-suite vibes overlooking the Manhattan skyline.
“Together with Monica Lewinsky and Vote.org, we’re reminding you that you’ve got the power,” reads the accompanying copy. “And that you need to vote this year.” There are a couple quotes from Lewinsky on the importance of voting, as well as some messaging around the campaign’s purpose. “Monica’s been empowering women to use their voices and feel powerful for a long time,” a caption reads. “So it just makes sense that she’d help us do the same.”
These images of Lewinsky brought me an immediate sense of pleasure and pop cultural delight. Of course. Of course! We love Monica. How wonderful to see her celebrated as powerful, after being so thoroughly disempowered. But the campaign also filled me with no small amount of dread. It is cashing in on Lewinsky, a rightful icon of redemption and revised narratives, in a canny example of “empowerment” marketing.
From the power poses to the C-suite backdrop, the campaign relies on symbols of lean-in, girl-boss feminism (which, of course, is all about personal achievement within the system, as opposed to collective gain and systemic change). It also draws on the influences of commercial feminism, which has long equated individual choices, especially consumer choices, with empowerment—specifically, the feeling of individual power. That’s exactly and explicitly what is on offer when Reformation says that this “new collection is here to remind you that you’ve got the power.”
This campaign manages to go a step further: it equates buying shit with the feeling of both individual power and collective empowerment by throwing voting into the mix. “A powerful outfit alone isn’t going to create a more perfect union,” reads a tongue-in-cheek press release. “But putting it on and going to the polls is a damn good place to start.”
This campaign isn’t meaningfully selling women on voting so much as it is selling them the feeling of voting. It weds the power suit to the promise of social change. Let’s be real about the actual degree of social service being provided by this campaign: On the Reformation website, you have to scroll past photos of Lewinsky modeling a $798 leather trench and a $448 purse before you’re served a call to action: “Now go vote.” Click and you’re directed to a landing page with a link to Vote.org to register. They also remind you that the general election is November 5.
Perhaps the best thing that can be said about the political impact of the campaign is that Reformation will donate 100 percent of the proceeds of a $78 “You’ve Got the Power” sweatshirt to Vote.org. This kind of thing is not unusual. Companies routinely donate some portion of proceeds, large or small, to a good cause, which also raises awareness about said cause. Of course, these companies are also raising awareness about themselves, building a brand identity, and, in the process, selling their products.
Reformation has shown itself to be very good at this. Several years ago, Jia Tolentino wrote in the New Yorker about Reformation as an eco-friendly fashion brand that she had noticed was “targeting me attitudinally.” It had become the “obvious choice” for wedding attire for women “who rolled their eyes at heterosexual consumerist monogamy but adhered faithfully enough to its precepts to want to look hot.”
The company doesn’t just sell the allure of hotness: it sells who is she dresses alongside a professed commitment to environmentally-friendly fabrics, carbon-neutrality, and regular sustainability reports. It sells the feeling of doing good while looking hot—or as the headline of the New Yorker piece puts it, “virtue and vanity.”
This is part of a strategic marketing campaign to make sustainability “really sexy,” as Yael Aflalo, the company’s founder, once said. Aflalo has described Reformation as “altruism and narcissism combined” and “Zara but with a soul.” As Tolentino pointed out, though, the brand’s commitment to sustainability—the whole “soul” bit—has inevitably slipped as its popularity and production has grown.
If Reformation’s brand’s identity captures “the idea that ecological responsibility dovetails, in some actual way, with being conventionally hot,” as Tolentino wrote, this latest campaign slyly joins women’s power with being conventionally hot. Part of the pleasure of this campaign is that it adds a new chapter to Lewinsky’s redemption arc: getting to play the part of the model, to wear pretty things, to look hot.
And my god, my god, this is to say nothing of how paternalistic, patently false, and totally apolitical it is to simplistically “remind” women that “you’ve got the power” in our current predicament. We’re going into a presidential election where our “power” is being able to vote to keep our eroded democracy on life-support instead of irretrievably pulling the plug on it; it’s being able to choose the much-lesser of two evils, which is still evil. That power is both utterly essential and tragically compromised. Rebecca Traister wrote ahead of the overturn of Roe v. Wade, “the future is messy and sad and difficult and extremely bleak,” which applies to abortion and so much else.
As Traister put it then, we have “to settle into the work ahead.” That message doesn’t sell clothes. It doesn’t make you feel good. But it’s the actual work of empowerment.
Thank you for putting into words exactly how I’ve been feeling about this! Selling the optics/feelings of voting is *such* an interesting little choice (this election year especially) and they do it so well
I was a little alarmed how many people took a purely celebratory response to the marketing. My jaw dropped when I saw the text --- why is Monica the face of having 'power' in relation to a president?!?! Thank you for taking the time to explain the hypocrisy and contradictions.