Bethany Mandel has gotten a lot of traction for an interesting story: A small Lithuanian clothing company that sells “traditional” dresses decided to “partner” with a bearded male influencer to help market its clothing. Real women, many of whom were stalwart customers, were not happy. However, if those same women had carefully perused the website in advance, they wouldn’t have been surprised. The woke clues were all there.

Son de Flor’s motto is “Timeless Linen Dresses with a Story.” If you scan the company’s Instagram page, you’ll see picture after picture of women in traditional dresses that provide full coverage from neck to knee. Everything plays to nostalgia, making customers think of a pastoral, pre-modern era when women’s clothes weren’t minuscule, spraypainted on, and ripped in strategic places; a time when Hollywood’s biggest female stars didn’t look as if they were auditioning for an adult movie.

But there’s one discordant picture amongst all these hyperfeminine moments. Is that a man? With a beard? Why yes, it is!

The man is David Ross Lawn, and he’s some sort of influencer, complete with 155,000 followers. Lawn describes himself as “fluid.” Or, as I describe people like that, he’s an “it” person. That is, if he’s disavowed being either male or female, there’s only one choice left. It turns out that Son de Flor partnered with Lawn so that it could model the company’s traditional, feminine clothes:

Mandel wrote that many of the store’s customers are, like herself, traditional women who want modest clothes, and they were not pleased. Rather than placate its customers, Son de Flor, with help from Lawn, pushed back:

Perhaps even crazier than the collaboration is the fact that when women complained in the comments, Lawn decided to antagonize them. One woman commented, “Way to oppress women yet again with men in women’s spaces. Bye.” To which Lawn replied, “look! A wild TERF appeared!” Another women [sic] said, “Respectfully, this is not a company that I will continue to support. Despite how people feel, this is not good for anyone.” Lawn commented with a thumbs up emoji and quipped “see ya!” The brand account dug its heels a few days later, posting an image of Lawn in their dress with the words, “In a world where you can be anything, choose to be kind. Yours, Son de Flor”[.] 

Mandel’s main point is that this was a stupid marketing move for a company that will inevitably have conservative customers. The subtext, though, is “who could have seen this coming?” After all, the corporate aesthetic is all about traditionalism.

But here’s a consumer tip: Don’t just look at a company’s product or its social media. Instead, check out its website for pages about its “mission,” “corporate values,” “about us,” or similar pages. In Son de Flor’s case, the giveaway that this is a hard-left company is on the “Our Story” page.

The “story” starts with a quotation meant to suggest conservative values:

“Our story started from one beautiful Dress we used to see our Mother wearing on many occasions when we were little girls. Having grown in Lithuania, a small country near the Baltic Sea, we replicated this iconic Dress from the fabric we loved the most - linen, and called it a Classic Dress. The dress became the foundation for our timeless, slow and sustainable fashion brand which you now know by the name of Son de Flor.” - Vaida & Indre [Emphasis mine]

“Mother,” “iconic,” “timeless, slow…” Sounds good, right up until you get to the word “sustainable.” There’s your leftist trigger word. Conservatives never use that word, whether in the U.S. or Lithuania. If you continue down the page, you’ll find it’s dripping with leftist words, phrases, and ideas:

We know that every decision we make has an impact on our planet…

[W]e're proud to partner up with One Tree Planted, an NGO that focuses on reforestation efforts around the world. [snip] In this case we aim to reduce our carbon footprint to zero.

Our commitment to supporting local communities is reflected in the decision to produce garments locally, which has the added benefit of reducing the brand's carbon footprint.

By choosing to use linen for our timeless dresses, we hope not only to reduce our carbon footprint but also to ensure that our clothing is safe and healthy for our customers to wear.

They’re like a rattlesnake. You can hear the leftism coming from a mile away.

The entire leftist ethos is emphasized thanks to a picture of the “wonder-making team,” a huge collection of white women (this is Lithuania, after all), without even a single token third-worlder (and they do have non-whites in Lithuania). Whether in America or Europe, if there’s a preponderance of young white women, you know the organization is leftist unless it explicitly states otherwise:

Image: Screen grab from Son de Flor website.

It was obviously upsetting for those company customers hoping to buy modest dresses to see what seemed like a hard-left swerve, thanks to a bearded man twirling about. However, in the future, we all need to remember that we can keep our money from funding this type of arrant leftist nonsense if we review not only the company’s products and its shipping and return policies but also its “about” page.