I was poised over the play arrow on the video link in the email announcing shoemaker Stuart Weitzman’s fall 2024 ad campaign and hesitated, bracing myself for the familiar feeling of letdown, of the stab in the back, of Et tu, Stuart?
The title of the short film anchoring Weitzman’s ad campaign is “How Lovely to be a Woman,” and these days anything mentioning “woman” could spell trouble and heartbreak ahead. So many of our favorite brands have betrayed us in recent years, turned into Pod People overnight, become victims of the woke mind virus — especially in the sheep-like fashion industry.
Vogue magazine, to which I subscribed since I was a little kid, became The Nation with glossier photos and haranguing articles about the brutal occupation of the West Bank. Teen Vogue became a nightmare, with how-to guides for anal sex and glowing coverage of Columbia University’s pro-Hamas tent city. To avoid offense in its “Snow White” remake, Disney cast a Hispanic as “Snow White” and brought in seven normal-sized people to play the dwarves.
Fashion seems particularly susceptible to any woke nonsense that comes down the pike, I suspect because their product is ultimately so irrelevant that the makers have to fight that much harder to justify their existence. It doesn’t hurt that activist groups pressure big corporations to feature ads with transgender imagery to be branded “inclusive” and get access to mega finance.
And so fashion has jumped with both feet on the trans movement. The online magazine Bustle trilled about runways at last fall’s New York Fashion Week because they were “awash in…[male-to-female] trans models.”
So, as my finger hesitated over the play arrow, the million-dollar question became how would Weitzman, one of my favorite purveyors of classic pumps and slingbacks, answer the question “What is a Woman?” He is, after all, old (83 and still very much helming his company), white, and a very successful Jew. It was with a great sense of gratitude that I discovered the old coot has stuck to his woman-loving and otherwise traditional guns. The “How Lovely to be a Woman” movie-ette features all real women.
I know this because I have eyes and like any normal human can spot the probable XY hiding in a forest of XXs (as we saw in the Summer Olympics with boxer Imane Khelif) but also because the Weitzman brand ambassadors — Christy Turlington, Issa Rae, Lucy Liu, Ming Xi, and gymnast Aly Raisman — are all quite well-known. They are filmed mostly in iconic black-and-white, breezing through normal days, soothing babies, taking phone calls, studying laptops, applying makeup, taking a nap on the carpet of a brightly-lit corner office, and, in Raisman’s case, sticking a parallel bar landing.
Weitzman gave no quarter to another disturbing social trend: What Peggy Noonan called the “uglification” of everything earlier this year. “Artistic culture has taken a repulsive turn. It speaks of a society that hates itself, and hates life,” summarized the Wall Street Journal subhead.
Noonan was inspired to write the column after watching the Broadway reboot of “Cabaret” in which the Kit Kat Klub dancers — traditionally done as depraved and louche but still sexy and still female — have been rendered “ugly, bizarre, inartistic, fundamentally stupid. Also obscene but in a purposeless way, without meaning.”
Many of the “Kabaret Girls” are now boys, with beards to make sure we get it, dressed often in humiliating garb, like short pink tutus. They also perform actions such as sodomizing star Eddie Redmayne (who plays the “emcee”) with a toilet plunger. This is an affront, Noonan points out, for a number of reasons but especially because “Cabaret,” was choreographed by Bob Fosse, and Fosse “famously loved women.”
But, “no one loves women in this show. When we meet Sally Bowles, in the kind of dress a little girl might put on a doll, with heavy leather boots and harsh, garish makeup, the character doesn’t flirt, doesn’t seduce or charm. She barks and screams, angrily.”
I even like the ad’s soundtrack.
The backup song is also titled “How Lovely to be a Woman” and dates from the early sixties and the musical “Bye Bye Birdie.” The singer is not Ann Margaret, as in the movie version of the musical, but someone uncredited and almost inaudible who croons lyrics like these (trigger warning! Unenlightened early sixties lyrics!):
How lovely to have a figure
That’s round instead of flat
Whenever you hear boys whistle
You’re what they’re whistling at!It’s wonderful to feel
The way a woman feels
It gives you such a glow
Just to know
You’re wearing lipstick and heels
So there you go: an ad campaign that without snark, without apology, without irony celebrates feminine women. This advert may be a bit of cultural flotsam but it’s actually not such a small thing.
As the sainted Andrew Breitbart once told us, “politics is downstream from culture.” In ways small and large, we’re seeing a general pushback from progressivism, mostly as evidenced by small movements in the culture like the growth of female substackers and podcasters like Gen X, Y and Zers Freya India, Peachy Keenan, and The Daily Wire’s Brett Cooper, who are exploring how to remake love, sex, and marriage after the wreckage deeded to us by Feminism 2.0.
But there are very large societal movements against reality as well—such as the flight from DEI policies, Human Rights Campaign indices of vice, and woke advertising that ignores the core consumer. We are finally, as crusader Robby Starbuck put it, “Understanding that [our] wallets are a weapon,” and big brands are falling like ninepins.
May Weitzman sell lots and lots of pumps and slingbacks in 2024!
Stephanie Gutmann has written for publications ranging from National Review and the New Republic to Playboy, Elle, and the New York Times’ Styles section. She is the author of two books, “The Kinder, Gentler Military” (Scribner) and “The Other War: Israelis, Palestinians, and the Struggle for Media Supremacy” (Encounter). She lives in Rockland County, New York.
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