Modest Fashion as Consumer Resistance: An Existential Reading of the Tradwife Movement

Alisa Minina Jeunemaître ()
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Alisa Minina Jeunemaître: EM - EMLyon Business School

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Abstract: Drawing upon existential analysis informed by logotherapy, this research examines how conservative tradwife influencers use fashion and digital media to reclaim stability and meaning in the face of liquid modernity. Moving beyond reductive framings that portray tradwives as merely ideological regressive or agents of right-wing radicalization, this chapter explores how these women make sense of their lifestyle and fashion choices and what motivates them to construct their digital femininities in the ways they do. Through qualitative analysis of Instagram posts from key tradwife influencers, a community account, and a conservative lifestyle outlet, the study shows how digital displays of modest fashion, homemaking, and motherhood function as symbolic and spiritual acts of existential anchoring. These performances operate as meaning-making strategies that help tradwives resist the perceived ephemerality of contemporary consumer culture by reasserting family, faith, and rootedness as enduring values. In doing so, the chapter contributes to debates on gender, fashion, and consumer culture by discussing how digital performances of tradition articulate moral and spiritual responses to ontological insecurity in the context of late modernity.

Keywords: Gender; digital feminities; Tradwives; ideology; Modest fashion; Logotherapy; Consumer culture (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026-05-29
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Published in Transforming Gender Norms in Fashion, Palgrave Macmillan, pp.99 - 125, 2026, Palgrave Studies in Practice: Global Fashion Brand Management, 9783032157799. ⟨10.1007/978-3-032-15780-5_6⟩

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hal:journl:hal-05647730

DOI: 10.1007/978-3-032-15780-5_6

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