“Ripped to Shreds” is a biweekly column by Jaxon Havens about fashion politics.
A bottle blonde with a twinge of acid in her voice at all times, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt was fixed to the mean-girl look before she even opened her mouth. It didn’t help that when she did open her mouth, everything she said was so mean. But being a young, blonde, cross-bearing white woman, her appearance quickly became a topic of discussion. Especially after, two months ago, Christopher Anderson and Chris Whipple of Vanity Fair exposed the fresh injection sites littering her lips. That time having now passed, and the chemicals in her filler gone straight into her brain, we may now take an honest and sympathetic look at how Leavitt got so busted.
Leavitt has worn a cross necklace long before her current job. A thin cross with small silver gemstones can be spotted on her Instagram going as far back as February of 2022. Yet, such a skinny inconspicuous sign of Christianity was not enough for Leavitt’s press secretary debut. She used her first ever press briefing as a stage to showcase a second, fatter and shorter cross with larger diamonds. I mean, what’s more Christian than shiny things, right? This new blinged-out cross is completely absent from her social media prior to that January 28 briefing. The change is subtle enough that many could miss it, but it is emblematic of the effort Leavitt has put into crafting a sick and twisted Republican fantasy. Acting as the voice of the president, her appearance projects the image of a white Christian America that Trump has been clinging to for years.
The prominence of her cross thus drew criticism, with Jon Stewart joking that her necklace is a “weird Pinocchio cross” that grows with every lie she tells. Leavitt has been abandoning the cross more lately, with some speculating she needs to hide from God due to the outrageousness of the Epstein files. Sure enough, when Leavitt declared that the White House was “moving on” from the files this last Tuesday, February 10, her cross was nowhere to be seen.
Beyond the cross, Leavitt has undergone a dramatic shift in her appearance in the last two years. Her Instagram tells the story of a woman who has lost all joy in her life. She used to rock super-ripped jeans and jerseys on her free days, dressing up for formal events in a cocktail-length dress with lacey cutouts and wearing a black turtleneck when working as an intern during the first Trump Administration. She was evil back then, too—don’t be fooled. But she dressed like a real person. This made it incredibly jarring to see the jump to knockoff-Chanel tweed getups with contrast-color trims and big golden buttons that dangle from false pockets.
This shift began in 2024, when she worked as the national press secretary for Trump’s 2024 campaign. Her outfits were baffling. A sleeveless white knit with a black trim and pearl buttons so heavy the ribbed fabric slouched around them. A pickle-green tweed vest with nothing under it. A fire-engine-red tweed dress with black trim and a peplum paired with….black stockings? No traces of the old Karoline remained. She’s beyond her days of taking thotty butt pics while slurping up gelato in Italy.
It’s all horrifying. But not just because the clothes are ugly. The conservative political machine took a young woman, full of life (and full of hate) and made her feel like she had to dress with a degree of class she never had. No longer just the daughter of a used truck dealership owner, it was time for her to pull off the “clean, white, professional-yet-feminine, Christian, old-money, plastic-surgery-ed” image that conservatives demand of the Republican party’s women.
It is not just the clothes, either. Leavitt’s face has also become a point of distress. On November 16, 2024, TikToker Suzanne Lambert poked fun at the makeup routines of “maga girlies” ––foundation that doesn’t match skin tones, warm blush that draws the eye downward to make the face droop. Leavitt showed off her own makeup routine in a since-deleted video where, just as Lambert might have expected, she applied her foundation with only her fingers.
Like many other sufferers of the so-called “Mar-a-Lago Face,” Leavitt’s lips have grown a few sizes since she entered the public eye. In Anderson’s photoshoot, the tracks left behind from her injections were laid bare to the world. Yet, doctors and netizens have pointed out that, given the timeline of the Vanity Fair photoshoots and Leavitt’s current pregnancy, her visible filler sites indicate that she was already pregnant at the time of injection. Health Digest explains that the FDA recommends against receiving lip filler injections during pregnancy, as well as other cosmetic injectables like Botox, noting that there has not been extensive testing with pregnant women precisely because of their vulnerability. Since fillers and Botox are category-C drugs for pregnancy risk, the lack of data around their use means that expecting mothers may be gambling with unhealthy fetal development and hormonal imbalances.
This kind of unnecessary surgical procedure during pregnancy is sad to see. Not because Leavitt is an unwitting victim, but because the conservative machine’s image of women as barbie-doll-perfect sex secretaries leads to so many Republican women ruining their bodies, faces, and wardrobes in order to look . . . the way all of them look.
A snarkier writer would say that the right’s reverse-feminism bites back at the women who uphold it by imprisoning them in a world of bad fashion choices and unskilled plastic surgeons. But instead, in the spirit of kindness, I offer a few words to Karoline:
Girl, we’ve all gotten in-over-our-heads before. You’re the youngest press secretary in U.S. history. And you’ve had a time. But a new baby means a new beginning! Don’t you want to go back to being just an average hateful white girl, instead of being the mouthpiece for all hateful-white-girlhood? Do one good thing in your life and leave it all behind you. Quit your job! Or at least, by God, quit it with the tweed.