A friend posted this image on Facebook. It’s an interesting bit of political messaging, but I’m not going to unpack the civil rights argument in the meme. Human rights deserve their own, more sustained discussion, which I’ll leave for another time and place. Instead, I want to focus on something else that struck me about this image: aesthetics. Specifically, the Mar-a-Lago Look and why it provokes such a strong reaction.
The Mar-a-Lago Look is an architectural and design aesthetic that has spilled over into forms of personal expression. It is maximalist: a visual language of wealth that prioritizes display over restraint. We see it in homes and public spaces that lean heavily on gold finishes, glossy marble, ornate columns, chandeliers, pastel or coral tones, and multiple classical motifs layered without much concern for subtlety. It borrows from European aristocratic cues, such as columns, scrollwork, and ballroom grandeur, filtering them through a Palm Beach resort sensibility where spectacle is the point.
Over time, this aesthetic has migrated from buildings into bodies. The Mar-a-Lago Look and the stereotype of MAGA women share the same aesthetic logic: a hyper-legibility of status. In both cases, the goal is not subtlety but immediate recognition. Just as gold leaf, chandeliers, and marble loudly proclaim luxury in interior design, visible cosmetic enhancements including voluminous blonde hair, prominent lips, sculpted facial features, and augmented curves, announce a particular view of femininity, wealth, and power. It may be unconscious, but it is certainly not accidental. It is the same aesthetic system, translated from marble and gold leaf into the body and fashion.
The Mar-a-Lago Look rejects the codes of old or quiet luxury (restraint, understatement, discretion) and replaces them with an excess of abundance and visibility. The message being sent is one of success on its own terms and a refusal to signal that success in ways approved by coastal or academic tastemakers. Excess becomes a political and cultural statement.
Taste is never neutral. What we call good or bad taste is really a shorthand for who belongs, who aspires, and who gets to set the standards. In a sociological context, the Mar-a-Lago Look is best understood as a form of anti-elite elitism.
Ironically, the look is also defensive in nature. Defense, in aesthetic terms, is about shoring up one’s position when status feels unstable. The hyper-polished body, the amplified markers of youth and sexuality, and the refusal of understatement all function as armor. In a cultural milieu where female social capital is often tied to beauty, desirability, and access, the Mar-a-Lago Look becomes a way of freezing those advantages in place, even as age, cultural change, or shifting political norms threaten them. What reads as confidence can also be understood as preemptive: a visual insistence on relevance, belonging, and alignment with power before those things can be questioned or withdrawn.
At a certain point, however, amplification itself becomes the problem. When signals meant to communicate beauty, luxury, or power are pushed beyond moderation into extremes, they can provoke an unexpected reaction. Not one of admiration, but instead, unease. This is where the Mar-a-Lago Look begins to shift from merely maximalist to something stranger, occupying a space where familiarity and discomfort coexist. To explain that reaction, it is useful to borrow a concept from another field entirely: the uncanny valley.
The uncanny valley is the idea that things which look almost human, but not quite, tend to feel creepy. The concept was proposed in 1970 by Masahiro Mori, a Japanese roboticist and engineer, who noticed this reaction to human-like robots. Once realism crosses a threshold and becomes indistinguishable from a real human, the discomfort fades and acceptance returns.
In practice, this explains why some CGI characters, robots, or digital avatars feel unsettling. Our brains are tuned to respond to human cues, and small errors trigger a “something’s wrong here” alarm.
In my view, the Mar-a-Lago Look occupies an aesthetic uncanny valley. Like a humanoid robot that is almost, but not quite, convincing, it deploys signals of luxury, beauty, and power so literally and in such an extreme manner that they begin to feel uncanny rather than aspirational. The discomfort it provokes does not arise from novelty or transgression, but from excess.
More broadly, this reaction helps explain why debates about taste are never trivial. Aesthetics shape how we recognize authority, legitimacy, and belonging; they quietly teach us who looks “natural” in positions of power and who appears to be trying too hard. When a look provokes discomfort, the question is rarely just whether it is beautiful or ugly. It is whether it aligns with our unspoken expectations about status, authenticity, and control.
In that sense, the Mar-a-Lago Look is not simply about individual preference or even partisan branding. It is a way of staging the self in relation to power, borrowing the visual grammar of palaces and luxury resorts and grafting it onto everyday life. Whether we find it compelling or unsettling has less to do with the amount of gold or gloss on display and more to do with what we think power should look like, who we believe is entitled to claim it, and how comfortable we are when those claims are made loudly instead of quietly.