How Melania Trump bested the luxury fashion houses

In normal times, designers would queue up to work with the incoming First Lady to secure their speck of posterity. The gown Melania Trump wears to the President’s inaugural ball on Monday evening for instance, will make history in the most literal sense. Ever since Helen Taft set the precedent in 1912, US First Ladies have donated their Inauguration outfits to Washington’s Smithsonian Museum. Let’s face it, she’ll look good “as she is”, says Flavia Masson, an American-Italian screenwriter who previously worked for Sonia Rykiel and Chanel, “the chicest First Lady since Jackie Kennedy”.

Melania would doubtless be gratified to hear this. Stephanie Winston Wolkoff, Melania’s one-time White House right hand, who later wrote a dagger-to-the-heart kiss and tell, says Melania cited Jackie Kennedy as her style crush for years. To an extent, the comparison bears out. Both women share a pristine perfection.

Melania knows she is glamorous and elegant. False modesty, as her recent best-selling autobiography Melania demonstrates, is not one of her weaknesses. In that book, she credits her dressmaker mother as a major influence who instilled in her young daughters the importance of self-care, “not only to a person’s well-being, but also to being able to effectively care for others… teaching me the importance of attending to one’s appearance before venturing into the world”.

Melania, the book, is a strange blend of tuning out any negativity and at the same time, circling back to it. Yet, if even an atom of Melania, the woman, secretly smarts at her exile from the fashion industry, she’s having the last laugh. She has enough money to buy whatever she wants, a strong sense of what suits her, and at least one loyal style advisor who has been with her since 2016.

Hervé Pierre, a French fashion and costume designer is Melania’s Oleg Cassini (the White Russian designer who shaped Jackie Kennedy’s Camelot style). Back in 1987, Pierre won a Christian Dior prize for theatre costume. He knows what he’s doing. Her clothes fit impeccably, emphasising her tall, leggy figure without making her look like a giant. It was Pierre who guided her towards the blue dress and matching jacket (very Jackie) she wore to the first swearing-in ceremony. That was custom made, by Ralph Lauren, a big Democrat supporter of many years standing, but too steeped in old school manners to refuse to help out a First Lady, whatever her politics.

Not everyone can place politics to one side. If anything, opinions of Melania are even more viscerally expressed after she remained by her husband’s side rather than bolting the minute he was out of the White House, as many predicted she would.

Additionally, Melania, perhaps in an attempt to fill a dignity-deficit among the senior Trumps, can come across as chilly. Is that because her clothes are so very glacial, or because she’s had to suppress so much anger? (“What normal woman could handle all that?” Winston Wolkoff demands, referring not just to the constant scrutiny but to life with Trump. “No one.”)

Melania’s sartorial entry in 2016 wasn’t normal either. She was not greeted with the usual offers of help from the fashion industry, for whom dressing a First Lady is considered an honour and patriotic duty. Instead, various designers, including Tom Ford and Marc Jacobs, released statements declaring they were not interested in dressing her.

She and Pierre (who had previously styled Carla Bruni) were on their own, mostly getting it right but, with their shared European backgrounds, also sometimes misjudging the mood music. She was castigated in the Democrat-supporting press, especially, for being tone deaf in her expensive choices, but also on a micro level. Her sky scraper heels in particular seem to offend many women.

Second time around, it’s harder than ever to get anyone in the fashion industry to go on the record about Melania – apart from Pierre, who granted an interview to Women’s Wear Daily last November. Rosemary Feitelberg, the journalist who interviewed Pierre, approached sixteen other designers to discuss Melania’s style. All declined.

Maxine Trowbridge, founder of Dallas-based emerging fashion line Eve & Max, understands why. “I have Republican and Democrat friends, but It’s no longer possible to have conversations where you politely disagree”, says Trowbridge, a naturalised Brit who agreed to talk to me because she thinks Melania has been unfairly treated.

“The Trumps were categorically not Washington People,” she says. “Melania never went through years of learning how to dress for a life in politics. So for the first term, it was a big transition. First Ladies can’t win. But objectively, I think she dresses beautifully. She’s brought dignity to the role with a dash of sass and dresses very age-appropriately.”

Watching a middle-aged woman being the equivalent of slow hand-clapped by the cool crowd should have made for uncomfortable viewing back in 2016. But a billionaire’s wife being snubbed by the very mouths she fed proved an irresistible circus for many. Who can forget the time Melania took Diplomacy Dressing too far by donning what looked like a Colonial pith helmet in Kenya? Then there was the cost of her wardrobe – few outfits clock in under $4,000. When she did wear high street – jetting into a children’s migrant centre on the US/Mexican border in a $39 Zara parka with the words, “I really don’t care, do u?” graffiti’d on the back – it monumentally backfired.

Would mixing in accessible brands endear her to non-Republicans more? Even off duty, she’s a Michael Kors and Birkin kind of woman, rather than a J Crew one. “It’s a very polished, traditionally feminine, luxury designer fashion,” says Chantal Fernandez, a US fashion and beauty writer. “Very tasteful, but not easily replicable for the average American woman, especially since no one wears sky-high heels like she does. I don’t know whether she’s had discernible influence like Michelle Obama, who made high-low and supporting up and coming American designers part of her fashion approach”.

In fact, Melania has helped sell specific outfits. Someone who worked for a luxury retailer told me that an an ivory Roksanda dress with sculpted sleeves sold out after she wore it in 2016.

Fernandez says she’ll keep a closer eye on Melania’s style this time round. “I’m curious to see where she goes with her style in the next four years. I don’t see her rift with the fashion world healing or her being invited to fashion shows. But I don’t see her wanting to play that game either. Her personality is about not being bothered how people perceive her.”

It’s going to be a complex, unfolding power play. In one camp we have Bernard Arnault, CEO of LVMH – which owns Dior, Celine, Louis Vuitton, Givenchy, Loewe, Tiffany, Loro Piana, Dior (many of Melania’s favourite labels) and about 80 per cent of Marc Jacobs. Arnault is the biggest player in the fashion world and has been publicly hobnobbing at Mar-a-Lago, the Trumps’ Floridian Xanadu. His son Alexandre attended Trump rallies in New York.

In the other, we have American Vogue’s pictorial tribute, last summer, to the many American First Ladies who have graced its pages over the past century. Even Pat Nixon, wife of another reviled US president, got her moment in the flashlight. And lest we forget, Asma al-Assad (wife of ousted Syrian dictator, Bashar) was honoured with a hagiography in the magazine in 2011.

But there is no trace of Melania in her regal White House incarnation, although she featured in the magazine several times in her earlier days as Donald Trump’s girlfriend.

You don’t have to be a fan to find Melania’s style evolution from the sexy slip dresses and cleavage-centric looks of the early Nineties to her current icy elegance worth a study. “It’s a look that’s geographically specific,” explains Trowbridge, who spends part of every year in Palm Beach, mothership to the Trumps and their moneyed supporters. “Lots of bold colours, which Melania wears very well. It’s completely different from Manhattan, where the style nods towards a more minimalist and monochrome ensemble. Melania is much more luxe and European than Washington. Palm Beach is polished, expensive and conservative and she does it very well. People in Palm Beach admire the way she looks.”

Vogue’s relevance may be waning, but Anna Wintour remains a force and smaller brands might deduce that “colluding” with Melania could damage their chances with Wintour. On the other hand, business is business. Arnault and Trump’s warming relationship culminated in the opening, in 2019, of a large LVMH factory in a small town in the unlikely location of Texas. Trump could claim 1,000 US jobs potentially created, while Arnault neatly circumvented any tariffs loaded onto luxury goods made outside the US.

“I understand why brands don’t advertise the fact she’s wearing them,” says Trowbridge. “Politics are so divisive in the US. It’s best to avoid the subject. There are so many challenges to the industry right now, the last thing any brand needs is to be on the wrong end of a social media storm.”

And yet… glamour-takes-all moments such as Melania in a lemon, floor length caped chiffon J Mendel dress at Blenheim Palace in 2018, or the red short-sleeved dress and matching Louboutins she wore on 60 Minutes just after her husband’s victory in 2016 are priceless. Especially now, when fashion is experiencing a sales slump across the world.

The red 60 Minutes dress “was the first time I took notice of her style,’’ says Masson, talking to me from Venice.

“There was always a lot of focus on Melania’s style from the moment she started dating Trump in the late Nineties. At the time I didn’t take either of them seriously,” says Masson. “It wasn’t a chic era. Fashion was all about looking sexy and provocative… but she looked so impeccable [on 60 Minutes]. She really asserted herself with what kind of First Lady she would be.”

Masson, who describes herself as a floating voter, maintains a lens of objectivity when it comes to Melania’s style. “People have become irrational. If you say anything remotely positive about Melania, you’re branded, which I find perplexing. As President Roosevelt said, ‘politeness is a sign of dignity, not subservience’. Melania’s a former model and wears clothes very well – fact.”

Masson isn’t wrong about the fashion industry’s cognitive blindness where Melania’s concerned, although after she wore a “pilgrim” style white collared black Valentino dress to Jimmy Carter’s funeral recently, there has been a discernible piquing of interest. While it dates from 2019, it was more fashion-forward than most of her publicly-worn outfits of the past few years. Could rewearing clothes from her own wardrobe become more of a hallmark of her next four years?

One scenario seems sure. She’ll continue to pay for her own clothes – and that works for all parties. It means Melania can wear what best suits her without feeling obliged to champion a designer doing her a favour. Meanwhile, the brands continue to maintain their political distance – while reaping the rewards of those photo-ops.