What the Loud Luxury of ‘The White Lotus’ Says About MAGA, Republican Style, and the Fantasy of Wealth

When we first meet the guests of The White Lotus season three, pulling into the dock on lush Koh Samui, three of them are having the time of their lives, falling all over one another laughing on the boat ride over. They are all blond, they are all wrapped in luxury clothing (a Zimmerman maxi, a Paul Smith sundress, and an Alemais mini—a sales receipt equivalent to about $2,000), shielded by enormous designer sunglasses, and clutching various other IYKYK high-fashion items (vintage Chanel wedges, a Loewe Squeeze purse, a Valentino shoulder bag—the bags are another $8,000 or so together, and the shoes have been listed around $400 on resale sites). We can’t immediately differentiate between Leslie Bibb’s Kate, Carrie Coon’s Laurie, and Michelle Monaghan’s Jaclyn, but one glance tells us that these women aren’t just rich—they’re rich rich.

In a later episode, as a boozy dinner conversation turns to the election, and Jaclyn (made-in-Italy swimwear brand Pin-Up Stars) and Laurie (Bella Freud) ask Kate (Alemais again, with Polene earrings and, as always, two Cartier Love bracelets clanking on her wrist), with a dawning horror, whether she voted for Donald Trump.

Kate blows them off with a sip of rosé and a question of her own: “Are we really gonna talk about Trump tonight?”

We fire up our screens on Sunday evening and tune in to see the latest of White Lotus’s rich people behaving poorly, swanning around in caftans that hide all manner of sins. It’s easy to explain our obsession with the show as an escapist pleasure, but in the Trump era, perhaps those LBHs (“losers back home,” in the show’s parlance) are familiar: A critical mass of wealthy and entitled people who want to communicate to you exactly how well-off they are, opting for a locale where everyone who isn’t a traveling companion is there expressly to serve. The loud luxury of The White Lotus and the real world bears enough volume to drown out questions about who’s donning the outfits, such as: What do they say about the wearer?

In the era of Trump 2, do you know exactly who’s MAGA in your life? Are you sure? Fashion may hold the clues.

Alex Bovaird, the show’s costume designer, tells Vanity Fair that the homogeneity of the three friends’ looks, despite their hailing from different regions (New York, Texas, and California), purposefully gestures toward the assumptions we tend to make: that people who look like us are, in fact, like us.

“I wanted to keep them throughout as kind of still interchangeable, so that when they reveal themselves, it’s sort of subtle, and it starts to make you think, Oh yeah, they’re not all the same,” she says. “It’s not like Kate comes off the boat wearing a MAGA hat or anything.”

Bovaird drapes the show’s characters in brands meant to invoke expensive taste and the social background that can afford them, whether by way of generational wealth, marriage, long hours of white-collar work, or simply long hours of white-collar crime. They’re carelessly rich: Jaclyn wears an open Chanel gown to the pool over a swimsuit, treating a $7,000-plus archival runway look as casually as a hotel robe. (Her Eres one-piece swimsuit retails at a friendlier $600.) Kate later dons a similarly simple hot-pink tank suit; it’s by Valentino. Men are sockless in Gucci loafers; women are lounging in Loewe and pulling lip balm and lorazepam out of their capacious JW Anderson bags. Bovaird says she would have stacked “like 20” of the Cartier bracelets on Kate, had budget allowed (“like 20” would run around $147,000).

And then, of course, there are the caftans. Bovaird was inspired by Southern vintage queen Susan Dumas, especially while building the wardrobe of Victoria Ratliff (Parker Posey), who has only visited the beach once—in a dream. She spends her time in and around her villa, swathed in billowing dresses and caftans. They’re comfy, but not practical for non-horizontal activities.

Bovaird thinks back on the very, very hot months she spent in Thailand filming, musing that a caftan presents the option of wrapping ourselves in a garment that’s as comfortable as it is obfuscating. “The world is cooking, and maybe we’re all gonna have to wear caftans,” she jokes. “Maybe, if there’s an apocalyptic movie, everyone’s gonna be really elegant.”

The loud luxury of the White Lotus—here we mean the fictitious resort franchise, rather than the show itself—stands in contrast to both the “quiet luxury” obsession of the past few years, all single strands of pearls, cashmere sweaters, and varying tones of camel, as well as the demure Republican breeder garb of the tradwife, in florals and girlish smocked dresses. Since Trump’s reelection, we’ve come to expect cardboard-stiff barrel curls and a fresco of full-coverage foundation at an ICE raid, neon pink blazers in the front row of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s confirmation hearing, and a bra worn as a shirt on the dais at the presidential inauguration. The official MAGA crew feels empowered and entitled, and they invite you to take a good, long look. It’s those in the in-between, clad in Valentino maxis—that cost more than a month’s rent on a one-bedroom downtown—for another strenuous afternoon of sitting on a chaise longue, who are asking, “Do we really need to talk about politics right now?” Cartier bangles a-clinking. It’s that no-consequences vacation mindset, an OOO autoresponder for confronting uncomfortable moral and ethical questions about Trump, just as long as the economy and those executive orders aren’t impacting them.

Posey’s Victoria sums up this entitled, frippery-filled mindset perfectly when she murmurs that, “I just don’t think, at this age, that I’m meant to live an uncomfortable life.”

The whodunit of Mike White’s immensely popular HBO show is part of the allure, sure, but so is the fascination of seeing the fabulously wealthy on vacation. Bovaird calls the show and her “postcard styling” “really good escapist TV,” but maybe it’s more real than that—the daily news is also full of the fabulously wealthy (or so they keep telling us) behaving poorly at Americans’ expense. The high-end fashion statements of Palm Beach, Florida, where Trump’s Mar-a-Lago is situated, are migrating into the wider world along with the MAGA carefree-as-long-as-it-works-for-me attitude.

Fashion remains a form of art and self-expression, not to mention just plain fun. However, for some, that self-expression has taken a turn since the election, with a new emphasis on access, wealth, and privilege. If it were even somewhat socially acceptable to leave a price tag visible, you know many of these MAGAfluencers would be right there with their hangtags proudly on display. They’re wielding loud luxury like a bullhorn inches from the ear: Look. At. Me. Even Duke, the university that multiple members of the show’s Ratliff family have attended, objected to Jason Isaacs’s character, the money-laundering Timothy, wearing a shirt emblazoned with the school’s logo as he contemplates suicide, holding a gun to his temple. (Bovaird declined to comment to VF on the Duke upset.)

Alix Friedberg, the costume designer for Palm Royale, the Palm Beach–set period show currently wrapping production on season two, tells VF that she’s noticed a recent sartorial shift toward dressing like a social climber dying to be seen in the latest and greatest.

“It’s letting everybody know that you just bought that, and it cost this amount of money, and it’s very identifiable,” she says. “I feel like that definitely correlates to the Mar-a-Lago of it all in the sort of epicenter of our current political leadership. It’s loud, proud Americana—kind of, ‘We’re the leaders of the of the free world, and let’s say that from the top of a mountain with the color and the brand.’”

The resortwear influence on current trends, she says, is cosplay in a sense. As she puts it, you’re “living in this sort of luxury lifestyle where it’s poolside and bright colors, big sunglasses and gold chains, kind of that world, saying a lot about you before you open your mouth.” To avoid a target on your back, blend in and play the part of a carefree beachgoer.

On the popular Instagram account “Class of Palm Beach,” Devorah Ezagui begins most clips crooning “I love your outfit!” from behind the lens of an iPhone. Then, Ezagui’s subjects rattle off their fashion credits: Oscar de La Renta sundress this, Chanel sandals that, wrists laden with Rolexes, Van Cleef & Arpels, and jewels galore. There’s no such thing as being overdressed in Palm Beach, Ezagui, 29, tells VF, “not even a bit. And it’s welcome in every way.”

“Palm Beach is incredibly on the map right now, probably because of Trump, and because of what’s going on here: It’s being built up like never before,” she says. Ezagui is not a member of Mar-a-Lago, but “almost every single one of my friends is,” she says, and she’s gone there for events on numerous occasions. Postelection, she had an influx of followers, and she now regularly receives messages, “a lot, I would say, [asking] if I can help them in ways that they can get into Mar-a-Lago.”

Ezagui says she would “love” to get Melania Trump on “Class of Palm Beach.” “I think that she doesn’t get enough credit for her style, nothing to do with politics,” says Ezagui. “She has it. She’s a class act; she’s stylish. I know I would get a lot of remarks on that, but for me, it’s nothing political. It’s about her style.” She notes she would also feature Kamala Harris.

Politics come up while filming outfits “a whole lot of times,” but Ezagui edits around the commentary, committed to staying apolitical while depicting the millionaires and possibly billionaires she’s interviewing to the audiences who want to emulate them. “I’m really neutral, and I really just see people for who they are. I’m really that kind of a person.”

Eric Javits, the Miami-based designer of the first lady’s Inauguration Day hat, however, sees the current political landscape as a major part of the luxurious, beachy trend spreading, including the demure suiting of Capitol Hill getting a bit brighter and the logos more prominent. The Palm Beach region’s high-end fashion fixation, he tells VF, is aspirational.

“The people here have access to the best of everything,” he says. “Against that backdrop, the wealthiest group with access to everything, you know, why not up the fashion game?” In other words, who wouldn’t want to be one of them?

He attributes the rise of resortwear to postelection optimism, “bringing back a lot of this sort of positivity and opulence and all that in fashion.”

“Things are progressing the way that [Trump] promised they would,” Javits says. “He was trying to make the country safer and trying to negotiate the ending of wars and so forth. I mean, all that’s in the news daily, right? So I see that he’s sort of working to fulfill his campaign promises and all that’s positive.”

Do people actually have more money and more optimism, a belief that America is, in fact, great (again?); or is that just the image that they’d like to project, while their legs furiously kick under the chlorinated surface, trying to stay afloat in society? The MAGA girlies are excited to don their American flag–print bikinis and bedazzled red ball caps (another right-on-the-nose Victoria Ratliff summation: “Just because they’re rich doesn’t mean they’re not trashy”), while the quiet-luxury aesthetic of the recent Democratic-majority years didn’t have an equivalent to that billboard vibe. Is there really something to be loud and proud about these days?

Costume designer Bovaird presents a flipside to that optimism: “I definitely think that resort, where people are gravitating towards it, maybe it’s because of the same thing with the allure of The White Lotus: People want to escape. There’s a lot of drudgery and fear in people’s worldview at the moment, so maybe it helps to project a party, you know?”