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IOL News
8 minutes ago
- Entertainment
- IOL News
Is a floral dress a political statement?
Rachel Tashjian When the conservative youth group Turning Point USA was planning its recent Young Women's Leadership Summit in Texas, organizers sent out a Pinterest mood board of suggested looks. Amid a few images of sleeveless vests, skirt suits and pleated skirts were a number of floral dresses: some with puffed princess sleeves, others with a more casual, backyard-barnyard fit and a few that looked like vintage nightgowns. The attendees either took note of the mood board or didn't need it: reporting from the summit, Washington Post reporter Kara Voght described the attendees' looks as 'a smear of pastels and florals - ruffles on their dresses, cowboy boots on their feet, bows on their curls. The aesthetic could be summed up as Laura Ingalls Wilder-core, as if the little house on the prairie had been down the street from a Sephora.' Is the floral dress now the uniform of the conservative 'it' girl? Maybe as conservatives, especially millennials and Gen Z, become a cultural force rallying for women to take on more conventional roles of motherhood and homemaking, they are looking for the clothes that express, or align with, their worldview. A look at the recent fashion history of prairie and sundress styles makes this notion head spinning. The first wave came almost a decade ago, when Batsheva Hay began producing clothes inspired by her childhood obsession with Laura Ashley's Victoriana calico and floral printed dresses. Hay's upbringing in Queens was far from Ashley's very sincere life in the British countryside - the designer recalls reading that Ashley would bring fresh fruit from her farm into the office - but her printed prairie dresses, with puffed shoulders and ruffles on the cuffs and hems, became an unexpected hit, with celebrities like Chloë Sevigny, Natalie Portman and Erykah Badu wearing them out and about in New York and Los Angeles. 'The idea was that they were like a treat for me - these feminine, girly dresses that contrasted with my very corporate career as a lawyer, or that gave me something 'modest' or traditional to wear for Shabbat dinner that still allowed me to express myself,' Hay said. 'It was very much winking at this old-fashioned femininity.' Both Hay and her customers often wear the dresses with something unexpected: combat boots, or a baseball cap, or an outrageous lip color or hairstyle that make it clear the wearer is playing with these old-fashioned ideas about domesticity and womanhood. 'A lot of women feel like they need to f--- it up somehow.' Batsheva's dresses became a symbol of female empowerment - a statement that you could embrace traditional femininity without looking the part of the oppressed housewife. Other brands launched in the years following that also seemed to celebrate a more 'classic' concept of femininity with varying degrees of irony. New Yorker Sandy Liang has a cult following of Gen Z fans who love her ballerina-inspired sportswear. Then there is Doen, a line featuring simple nightgown-inspired dresses started by two sisters in California, as well as Loveshackfancy, a New York-based label that makes Laura Ashley-esque florals in much sexier cuts, often with bare midriffs or exposed hips. Hay's dresses continued in popularity as trends like cottagecore, a pandemic-era frenzy that romanticized country life, and modest fashion began permeating women's wardrobes. But increasingly, Hay says, she has seen dresses on conservative women - women like Hannah Neeleman, also known as Ballerina Farm on social media, who is often considered the beacon of the tradwife movement - that very much resemble hers. 'It's really fascinating to see,' Hay said. 'They take the idea of these dresses, this romanticized idea of living in the country, and interpret it very earnestly.' Cottagecore practitioners were just fantasizing that they wanted to move to the country and become a stay-at-home moms - until something shifted and a lot of women suddenly, sincerely, wanted to. Last year, Evie Magazine, which is often called Cosmo for new conservatives, released what it calls the 'Raw Milkmaid Dress,' a fitted frock with puffed sleeves and a plunging neckline that emphasizes the décolletage and hugs the waist. It recalls the simple white dresses Marie Antoinette had made for her respites at the Petit Trianon, where (in a presaging of the cottagecore movement, perhaps) she played house and pet barnyard animals to escape the complex voyeurism of Versailles. Brittany Hugoboom, Evie's founder, said in an email interview that her team designed the dress for a cover story with Neeleman when they couldn't find the perfect milkmaid dress for their photo shoot. Hugoboom pointed to shows like 'Bridgerton' as the reason behind the revival of milkmaid styles. 'We took all our favorite elements from 18th-century French 'peasant' dresses, Regency era bodices, pieces worn in iconic films, and made it modern enough that supermodels would wear it to brunch,' she said. Evie has also introduced 'The Perfect Sundress,' a style with a built-in bra, which Hugoboom says sold out in 48 hours. 'Evie was always envisioned as a 'one-stop shop for femininity,'' said Hugoboom, whose publication is perhaps best-known for its Instagram account, with over 220,000 followers double-tapping posts that celebrate a traditional brand of femininity: the hottest guys of all time, 'how to stay madly in love with your husband' and clips of tradwives like Nara Smith speaking about the challenges of motherhood. She plans to introduce more clothes in the future. 'Instead of competing with men, many of us want to lean into our feminine traits like beauty, sensuality, softness, and charm,' she said. 'In recent years, trends have shifted toward women dressing for other women. We'll clock a Row handbag or a Khaite top and nod. But a lot of trends, like mom jeans or oversize blazers, aren't looks men love. So our goal was simple: dresses that women love to wear and men love to see women wearing. We love men, and we love being women. To me, it's a sign that the gender wars may finally be cooling off.' Biz Sherbert, a brand consultant and writer who often covers beauty standards and style in the second Trump era, describes conservative style not through a garment, per se. 'A lot of people are trying to define it because so much value is placed on it,' she said. 'Like, 'these are the women we're fighting for,' or 'this is what we need to preserve.'' Melania Trump may be the face of American conservative womanhood, but she most often wears highly tailored, almost armor-like styles that seem to protect her like a shell, along with tall spiked heels. It's far from the romantic styles of cottagecore. Sherbert also sees women on the right making tweaks to more traditional styles, but they are in the name of sex appeal instead of eccentricity - a high neck top with a very short skirt, or pearls with a minidress. 'There's an implicit sense of how a man would see this,' she said. 'A woman might say, 'Oh, that dress is cute.' But the real deciding factor would be a man saying, 'Oh, that's not a vibe.'' For Sherbert, the turning point when ultrafeminine styles moved from cheeky to sincere was the mania around tiny little bows in late 2023. 'On the TikTok shop, I would see Trump 2024 merchandise that was super coquette,' she said, referring to the TikTok aesthetic that emphasized ultra girly femininity. 'It was using this visual language that I had seen come up through Sandy Liang and people inspired by her,' said Sherbert. 'It was this brand of pastiche femininity that was so strong, and people [described as] reclaiming girlhood, but no one could ever substantiate why that was radical. It was vaguely feminist but ill-defined.' So how could so many women see different things in the same dress? 'People are consuming a lot of the same content, and then they go down different ideological rabbit holes,' she said. 'Maybe in this case, Republicans or conservatives are better at walking the walk of these lifestyles: They're actually going to go homestead. I'm not just going to live in Brooklyn and have this cottagecore fantasy.' Many of those in the new conservative movement, Sherbert pointed out, have been influenced by the culture and politics of an over-scrutinized New York neighborhood called Dimes Square, a pandemic party zone that nurtured a sense of skepticism around the left. Incidentally, Sandy Liang's shop is right in the middle, and Batsheva is just a few blocks away.
Business Insider
4 hours ago
- Business
- Business Insider
PINS vs. SNAP: TD Cowen Picks the Better Social Media Stock Ahead of Q2 Earnings
TD Cowen's top analyst, John Blackledge, issued his second-quarter fiscal 2025 previews for leading social media companies Snap (SNAP) and Pinterest (PINS). The firm's Q2 Ad Check survey indicates stronger demand momentum for Pinterest compared to Snapchat. As a result, Blackledge maintains a 'Buy' rating on PINS and a 'Hold' rating on SNAP stock. Elevate Your Investing Strategy: Take advantage of TipRanks Premium at 50% off! Unlock powerful investing tools, advanced data, and expert analyst insights to help you invest with confidence. Make smarter investment decisions with TipRanks' Smart Investor Picks, delivered to your inbox every week. Both platforms are also benefiting from uncertainty over the future of Chinese short-form video app TikTok's operations in the U.S., as well as from leadership issues at rival platform X following CEO Linda Yaccarino's abrupt departure. First, Let's Understand the Background The advertising segments of these companies were expected to be impacted by the U.S. trade tariffs announced in Q1, due to the removal of the de minimis exemption for goods under $800 from China. However, SNAP relies more heavily on Chinese advertisers, while Pinterest benefits from a diverse advertiser base in Europe and other regions, helping it offset losses from China. With this in mind, the analyst raised the model estimates and price targets for both stocks. Blackledge increased the PINS price target from $40 to $43, implying 19.5% upside potential from current levels. Meanwhile, he lifted SNAP's price target from $9 to $10, representing 4.8% upside potential from current levels. Notably, Blackledge is a five-star analyst on TipRanks, ranking #307 out of 9,861 analysts tracked. He boasts a 60% success rate and an average return per rating of 13.60%. PINS Stock Benefits from Higher Advertising Uptake In Q2, Blackledge expects Pinterest's revenues to grow 14.6% year-over-year to $977.9 million, driven by improved monetization and a growing contribution from the company's new Performance+ advertising tools. The firm's Ad Check showed strong uptake of Pinterest's Creative & Automated Bidding offerings so far. Meanwhile, advertisers are increasing their ad spend on Pinterest, with some seeing their spending grow by 66% compared to the same period last year. These are the highlights of Blackledge's optimistic view on PINS stock: Pinterest's Global Monthly Active Users (MAUs) are estimated to reach 578 million in Q2, up 10.7% year-over-year and 1.4% over Q1. Nearly 40% of U.S. Pinterest users visit the app or site to search for or shop for products, which is more than double the same metric for other social networks, including Snapchat, Reddit (RDDT), X, and Meta's (META) Facebook and Instagram apps. The survey shows steady growth in the overall time spent and user penetration on PINS compared to both Q1FY25 and the same period last year. SNAP Is Benefiting from Growing Subscriber Base In Q2, Blackledge expects Snapchat's revenues to grow 12.4% year-over-year to $1.4 billion. This growth is mainly driven by increased advertiser spending on Direct Response (DR) ads and a higher number of users paying for Snapchat+ subscriptions, which are expected to contribute about 37% of new revenue growth in Q2. Moreover, the analyst stated that the impact of tariffs was not as bad as feared, further improving the company's outlook. These are the highlights of Blackledge's optimistic view on SNAP stock: Snap's Daily Active Users (DAUs) are estimated to reach 468 million in Q2, up 7.3% year-over-year and 1.7% over Q1. Snapchat is benefiting from the shift in some advertiser spending from TikTok to Snap due to ongoing uncertainty regarding TikTok's U.S. operations. Snap's brand advertising business remains weak, with most growth coming from DR ads and higher subscriptions. Ending Thoughts Overall, while both Snap and Pinterest show promising growth drivers ahead of Q2 earnings, TD Cowen's analysis suggests Pinterest currently holds a stronger position as the better social media stock to watch. According to the TipRanks Stock Comparison Tool, PINS stock has a 'Strong Buy' consensus rating, reflecting Wall Street's bullish outlook on the stock.
Yahoo
14 hours ago
- Business
- Yahoo
Target's Roundel powers up offsite campaigns with AI-driven analysis
This story was originally published on Marketing Dive. To receive daily news and insights, subscribe to our free daily Marketing Dive newsletter. Target's retail media network Roundel has introduced a new artificial intelligence-powered feature designed to help advertisers use the retailer's first-party data and real-time shopping customer behavior to optimize offsite media campaigns, according to a company blog post. With Precision Plus by Roundel, advertisers can leverage data to build and launch campaigns aligned to specific awareness, consideration and conversion goals across platforms including Google, Meta, Pinterest and The Trade Desk. The retailer plans to invest heavily in Roundel throughout the year, including testing new in-store ad experiences like demos, sampling and digital screens; enhancing creative formats across the omnichannel journey, and providing more support for partners during seasonal campaigns. Roundel has become a bright spot for Target at an otherwise troubled time for the retailer. The company's revenue derived from its advertising business rose roughly 24% year over year to $649 million in 2024, with Roundel making up the lion's share of the segment. Target's plans to invest in Roundel come at a pivotal time for retail media networks and may be designed to address some of the challenges brands have faced when trying to make use of retail media. Even though the space has become crowded with competition, most networks have yet to deliver on their promises of data usability for more efficient and effective marketing campaigns, according to research. The size and impact of retail media networks have been overstated, according to Forrester, due to the dominance of one player: Amazon. In 2024, Amazon Ads' business was worth $47 billion, which was larger than all of the other retail networks combined. The next largest network was Walmart, with only $3.4 billion in revenue. Precision Plus by Roundel joins other recent updates like the introduction of more competitive pricing for ads that are intended to boost Roundel. Other features being spotlighted by the retailer include Target Product Ads, which use Target data to meet customers where they are and have shown to increase sales growth by as much as 35%; a new self-service creative studio; geo-enabled measurement tools and a digital-out-of-home feature that can place ads on billboards near Target stores that is connected to Roundel for closed-loop measurement. Roundel works with more than 2,000 vendors, including publishers like Pinterest, PopSugar, NBCUniversal, Hearst, USA Today and The New York Times, to deliver ads for brands such as Apple and Mars Wrigley. The company claims its network drove more than 250 million visits to Target properties in 2024. Other retailers are also trying to make their media networks more competitive. Walmart, for instance, purchased electronics company Vizio for $2.3 billion last year, giving the retailer a foothold in the connected TV marketplace. The company also revamped its Sam's Club Member Access Platform (MAP) with a stronger focus on personalized ads. Recommended Reading Target's digital ad unit delivers $2B in value for embattled retailer
Business Wire
14 hours ago
- Business
- Business Wire
Pinterest to Announce Second Quarter 2025 Results
SAN FRANCISCO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Pinterest, Inc. (NYSE: PINS) will release financial results for the second quarter 2025 on Thursday, August 7th, 2025 after market close. The company will host its quarterly conference call to discuss these results at 1:30 p.m. PT (4:30 p.m. ET) on the same day. A live webcast of the conference call and related earnings release materials can be accessed on Pinterest's Investor Relations website at A replay of the webcast will be available through the same link following the conference call. Disclosure Information Pinterest uses and intends to continue to use its Investor Relations website as a means of disclosing material nonpublic information and for complying with its disclosure obligations under Regulation FD. Accordingly, investors should monitor the company's Investor Relations website, in addition to following the company's press releases, SEC filings, public conference calls, presentations and webcasts. About Pinterest Pinterest is a visual search and discovery platform where people find inspiration, curate ideas, and shop products—all in a positive place online. Headquartered in San Francisco, Pinterest launched in 2010 and has over half a billion monthly active users worldwide.
Boston Globe
15 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Boston Globe
Is a floral dress a political statement?
Advertisement Is the floral dress now the uniform of the conservative 'it' girl? Maybe as conservatives, especially millennials and Gen Z, become a cultural force rallying for women to take on more conventional roles of motherhood and homemaking, they are looking for the clothes that express, or align with, their worldview. Alex Clark, (second from left) a wellness influencer and podcaster, at the Young Women's Leadership Summit on June 14. Organizers sent out a Pinterest mood board of suggested looks ahead of the summit. JAKE DOCKINS/NYT A look at the recent fashion history of prairie and sundress styles makes this notion head spinning. The first wave came almost a decade ago, when Batsheva Hay began producing clothes inspired by her childhood obsession with Laura Ashley's Victoriana calico and floral printed dresses. Hay's upbringing in Queens was far from Ashley's very sincere life in the British countryside — the designer recalls reading that Ashley would bring fresh fruit from her farm into the office — but her printed prairie dresses, with puffed shoulders and ruffles on the cuffs and hems, became an unexpected hit, with celebrities like Chloë Sevigny, Natalie Portman and Erykah Badu wearing them out and about in New York and Los Angeles. Related : Advertisement 'The idea was that they were like a treat for me — these feminine, girly dresses that contrasted with my very corporate career as a lawyer, or that gave me something 'modest' or traditional to wear for Shabbat dinner that still allowed me to express myself,' Hay said. 'It was very much winking at this old-fashioned femininity.' Both Hay and her customers often wear the dresses with something unexpected: combat boots, or a baseball cap, or an outrageous lip color or hairstyle that make it clear the wearer is playing with these old-fashioned ideas about domesticity and womanhood. 'A lot of women feel like they need to f*** it up somehow.' Batsheva's dresses became a symbol of female empowerment — a statement that you could embrace traditional femininity without looking the part of the oppressed housewife. Other brands launched in the years following that also seemed to celebrate a more 'classic' concept of femininity with varying degrees of irony. New Yorker Sandy Liang has a cult following of Gen Z fans who love her ballerina-inspired sportswear. Then there is Doen, a line featuring simple nightgown-inspired dresses started by two sisters in California, as well as Loveshackfancy, a New York-based label that makes Laura Ashley-esque florals in much sexier cuts, often with bare midriffs or exposed hips. Hay's dresses continued in popularity as trends like cottagecore, a pandemic-era frenzy that romanticized country life, and modest fashion began permeating women's wardrobes. But increasingly, Hay says, she has seen dresses on conservative women — women like Hannah Neeleman, also known as Ballerina Farm on social media, who is often considered the beacon of the tradwife movement — that very much resemble hers. Advertisement 'It's really fascinating to see,' Hay said. 'They take the idea of these dresses, this romanticized idea of living in the country, and interpret it very earnestly.' Cottagecore practitioners were just fantasizing that they wanted to move to the country and become a stay-at-home moms — until something shifted and a lot of women suddenly, sincerely, wanted to. Attendees at the Young Women's Leadership Summit in Grapevine. Many women often pair their prairie and sundress styles with something unexpected: combat boots, or a baseball cap, or an outrageous lip color or hairstyle. JAKE DOCKINS/NYT Last year, Evie Magazine, which is often called Cosmo for new conservatives, released what it calls the 'Raw Milkmaid Dress,' a fitted frock with puffed sleeves and a plunging neckline that emphasizes the décolletage and hugs the waist. It recalls the simple white dresses Marie Antoinette had made for her respites at the Petit Trianon, where (in a presaging of the cottagecore movement, perhaps) she played house and pet barnyard animals to escape the complex voyeurism of Versailles. Brittany Hugoboom, Evie's founder, said in an email interview that her team designed the dress for a cover story with Neeleman when they couldn't find the perfect milkmaid dress for their photo shoot. Hugoboom pointed to shows like 'Bridgerton' as the reason behind the revival of milkmaid styles. 'We took all our favorite elements from 18th-century French 'peasant' dresses, Regency era bodices, pieces worn in iconic films, and made it modern enough that supermodels would wear it to brunch,' she said. Related : Evie has also introduced 'The Perfect Sundress,' a style with a built-in bra, which Hugoboom says sold out in 48 hours. 'Evie was always envisioned as a 'one-stop shop for femininity,'' said Hugoboom, whose publication is perhaps best-known for its Instagram account, with over 220,000 followers double-tapping posts that celebrate a traditional brand of femininity: the hottest guys of all time, 'how to stay madly in love with your husband' and clips of tradwives like Nara Smith speaking about the challenges of motherhood. She plans to introduce more clothes in the future. Advertisement 'Instead of competing with men, many of us want to lean into our feminine traits like beauty, sensuality, softness, and charm,' she said. 'In recent years, trends have shifted toward women dressing for other women. We'll clock a Row handbag or a Khaite top and nod. But a lot of trends, like mom jeans or oversize blazers, aren't looks men love. So our goal was simple: dresses that women love to wear and men love to see women wearing. We love men, and we love being women. To me, it's a sign that the gender wars may finally be cooling off.' Biz Sherbert, a brand consultant and writer who often covers beauty standards and style in the second Trump era, describes conservative style not through a garment, per se. 'A lot of people are trying to define it because so much value is placed on it,' she said. 'Like, 'these are the women we're fighting for,' or 'this is what we need to preserve.'' Melania Trump may be the face of American conservative womanhood, but she most often wears highly tailored, almost armor-like styles that seem to protect her like a shell, along with tall spiked heels. It's far from the romantic styles of cottagecore. Related : Advertisement Sherbert also sees women on the right making tweaks to more traditional styles, but they are in the name of sex appeal instead of eccentricity — a high neck top with a very short skirt, or pearls with a minidress. 'There's an implicit sense of how a man would see this,' she said. 'A woman might say, ' Oh, that dress is cute.' But the real deciding factor would be a man saying, 'Oh, that's not a vibe.'" Attendees at the Young Women's Leadership Summit in Grapevine. Brittany Hugoboom, founder of the conservative magazine Evie, said that "many" of her customers "want to lean into our feminine traits like beauty, sensuality, softness, and charm." JAKE DOCKINS/NYT For Sherbert, the turning point when ultrafeminine styles moved from cheeky to sincere was the mania around tiny little bows in late 2023. 'On the TikTok shop, I would see Trump 2024 merchandise that was super coquette,' she said, referring to the TikTok aesthetic that emphasized ultra girly femininity. 'It was using this visual language that I had seen come up through Sandy Liang and people inspired by her,' said Sherbert. 'It was this brand of pastiche femininity that was so strong, and people [described as] reclaiming girlhood, but no one could ever substantiate why that was radical. It was vaguely feminist but ill-defined.' So how could so many women see different things in the same dress? 'People are consuming a lot of the same content, and then they go down different ideological rabbit holes,' she said. 'Maybe in this case, Republicans or conservatives are better at walking the walk of these lifestyles: They're actually going to go homestead. I'm not just going to live in Brooklyn and have this cottagecore fantasy.' Many of those in the new conservative movement, Sherbert pointed out, have been influenced by the culture and politics of an over-scrutinized New York neighborhood called Dimes Square, a pandemic party zone that nurtured a sense of skepticism around the left. Incidentally, Sandy Liang's shop is right in the middle, and Batsheva is just a few blocks away. Advertisement
