Since Christmas, the oh-so-woke fashion and lifestyle press has aggressively ignored first lady Melania Trump. Unlike her husband, she doesn’t bluster, tweet, or speechify; instead she speaks in the language of fashion. For French President Macron’s state visit, she wore this:
Impossible to be ignored. The Washington Post’s Robin Givhan writes
On these official occasions, the first lady sometimes appears to be dressing for a fashion-shoot version of the event — a kind of heightened reality of an already rather surreal circumstance. But there is also the sense that she is stubbornly and confidently dressing up and refusing to relax into today’s accepted decorum. The result is that she sometimes seems to have a tin ear for empathetic dressing. And sometimes, she wears a hat, which, for women, long ago ceased being about fashion in this country and became more of an affectation, whether it be the religiosity of Sunday church service or the self-conscious flamboyance of the Kentucky Derby.
A hat is a celebration of oneself. It is about presenting one’s most adorned, spit-shined, upright self to God, social media or, in this case, the history books.
“Empathetic dressing?” What kind of woke bullshit is that? “Today’s accepted decorum” is sweatpants or basketball jerseys at a wedding reception, t-shirts at a funeral, and airheads in phony ripped jeans; grown men don’t even own a suit to be buried in. Melania Trump reminds us that sometimes clothes do make the man; that we can be our very best selves.
The best part? “Taxpayers do not pay for the first lady’s wardrobe.”
