Scrolling through Instagram in early 2021, I came across Peachy Den’s “Hot at Home” campaign. It was comprised of lo-fi, camcorder-style videos of models lounging on stained sofas in velour flares, lighting candles, scratching their thighs. The captions, including ‘Sensuality is yours to own’, highlighted intimacy and self-love. It really caught my attention. Something about the softness felt relatable, but also suspiciously fake in its imperfection.
It was clearly feminist-coded. However, I remember pausing to think. Was this an attempt to reclaim the female gaze, or just new packaging?
That discomfort stayed with me, like I was meant to feel empowered, but only in a way that could still be marketed. Suffice to say I didn’t buy any of the clothes.
This question sits at the heart of ideology and hegemony in media. According to Stuart Hall’s encoding/decoding model,
messages are never neutral but always encoded with ideological meaning.
Stuart Hall (1980)
In this case, Peachy Den encodes a vision of empowerment through the aesthetic of softness, sensuality, and “realness”, but its decoding depends on the viewer’s lens. Some may see empowerment. Others might see capitalised vulnerability.
Drawing on Antonio Gramsci’s theory of hegemony, we can understand how dominant cultural norms adapt to absorb countercultural styles. The feminist energy of the campaign, with its anti-polished, anti-patriarchal tone, could be read as resistance. But it also fits into a neoliberal context where ‘buying the right vibe’ is marketed as liberation.
Peachy Den’s campaign doesn’t sell overt sex appeal. It sells ‘comfort as confidence’. However, in doing so, it risks aligning with post-feminist tropes where choice, pleasure, and self-expression are seen as inherently liberating, even if they conform to market norms. The message becomes: wear tight stretchy trousers, film yourself in grainy filters, and you too can reclaim your power. It made me think of how quickly radical ideas get absorbed into the same system they were trying to resist.
But who gets to feel empowered in these campaigns? Mostly slim, white, conventionally attractive women styled for hours to look “effortless.” As Angela McRobbie warns,
when feminism is aestheticised, it risks becoming a performance of liberation that still adheres to narrow ideals of beauty and desirability.
Angela McRobbie
And I couldn’t help but notice how similar the models looked to standard advertising. There’s still a mold, just dressed empowerment and the female gaze.
I don’t want to dismiss Peachy Den entirely. The brand does centre femininity, and its DIY, accessible production style challenges commercial ads. But it also toes the line between being rebellious and being marketable. By focusing on sensual self-expression through clothes, it ends up both challenging and repeating the same old beauty standards. This is unfortuantely a typical example of how power works in culture. And I get why people like it. I liked it too, at first. There’s something comforting about its vibe. But I also wonder who’s allowed to embody that comfort.
Peachy Den’s “Hot at Home” campaign is a perfect example of feminism made palatable for Instagram. Through Hall’s model, we can see the potential for both oppositional and negotiated readings. But through Gramsci and McRobbie, we see how easily empowerment becomes aestheticised, fitting into dominant ideologies while pretending to reject them.