QUESTIONS NOBODY IS ASKING: What’s Gloria Steinem Doing in the Lands’ End Catalog?

Lands’ End caters to women looking for reasonably priced, conservative clothing for themselves and their families. The designs follow the trends but are reliably un-risqué and tend toward classic cuts. That’s how I would describe them, anyway—as a regular shopper at Lands’ End. Someone more fashionable and less charitable might also classify them as middle class mom clothes.

Given that clientele, one would think the Lands’ End marketing department would stay out of politics. In such a divided and often passionately partisan country, little is gained by appearing to take sides in the culture wars or showing one’s red or blue political stripes.

Yet Lands’ End has incautiously taken a great leap into the political waters by proudly featuring Gloria Steinem as a “Legend” in their most recent catalogue. In addition to showcasing her in their finery, they include an interview conducted by Lands’ End’s CEO Federica Marchionni. The interview avoids hot button political topics—the uninformed reader would have no inkling of Steinem’s strident brand of feminism—instead offering a series of vacuous exchanges about pursuing one’s dreams, overcoming challenges, and living a meaningful life.

Shades of Restoration Hardware, which responded in the summer of 2010 to both the Obama recession and the looming Tea Party-driven GOP Congressional landslide by casting off their previous jaunty Ralph Lauren-inspired retro-American style and going full Weimar, with one of the most depressing catalogs that’s ever graced my mailbox. Or as I said to my wife as we flipped through its pages full of somber taupe-on-taupe weirdly desaturated colors, “My God, it’s the furniture of the damned” — or perhaps The Damned, Luchino Visconti’s 1969 movie on Nazi-era decadence and dissipation.