The powder-blue, pale suit dress that Melania Trump wore for her husband’s first inauguration – a custom design by Ralph Lauren – drew immediate comparisons to Jackie Kennedy.
Her hair, swept up loosely into a decidedly 1960s chignon, framed a smiling face as she evoked, through fashion, a golden age of political idealism.
This time round, things were decidedly more nuanced.
Opting for a more somber note, Melania cloaked herself in a custom navy silk wool coat dress – coordinating pencil skirt and ivory silk crepe blouse – all of which, to the surprise of many fashion watchers, had been hand sewn in New York City by the niche, but far from cut-price, American designer Adam Lippes.
Melania’s boater – by another American designer, Eric Javits – completed the striking ensemble.
Not since Hillary Clinton, in 1993, has a First Lady opted for an inauguration-day hat, adding not only a touch of the theatrical to Melania’s ensemble but almost entirely obscuring her eyes.
For a woman known for her love of sunglasses, perhaps this was the next-best choice on a day when the entire world would be watching her.
At first glance, Melania, 54, seems to have paid homage to the traditions required of First Ladies at inauguration.
She eschewed her favored European labels (despite having opted for both Dolce & Gabbana and Dior at the various pre-inaugural festivities), and shone a spotlight on two designers whose relatively unknown labels might now find a sudden uptick in sales thanks to this presidential patronage.
In a statement released Monday morning, Lippes said it had been an ‘honor’ for his New York atelier to dress Melania for a tradition that ’embodies the beauty of American democracy’, and that her outfit was the product of ‘America’s finest craftsmen’.
Javits, too, sounded off proudly about his hand-crafted creation, which he had made himself (only eight percent of the hand stitching on the hat was machine-sewn).
‘No other hands touched it… prior to Herve [Pierre, Melania’s personal stylist] and the First Lady receiving it,’ he said.
There was plenty of praise for the ‘Made in America’ ensemble – and a collective gasp from fashion commentators surprised that the new First Lady had been able to find American designers willing to kit her out. (Many achingly liberal and somewhat snobbish brands have declined to work with Melania ever since her husband launched his political career).
Of course, in order to locate these two designers for Melania, Herve Pierre had to wonder far from the boutiques of Madison Avenue (one of which had famously once turned him away at the door) and think outside the box of an American fashion world still dominated by the not-so-subtle disapproval of Democratic doyenne and Vogue editor, Anna Wintour.
Adam Lippes – whose only free-standing store is a small studio-style showroom in the luxury fashion mall, Brookfield Place (near the One World Trade Center) – is a relative newcomer and certainly not part of the elite club of the New York fashion world.
Eric Javits is even farther removed. A supplier of headwear and straw accessories to Bloomingdale’s and Nordstrom, he is currently Miami based. And that proximity to Mar-a-Lago meant that Herve was able to hand deliver the finished product to Melania in Palm Beach.
Yet Melania’s outfit today seems to me another reminder of what she does best: dressing unlike, and apart from, other First Ladies.
Emerging from the black SUV for her early morning service at St John’s Episcopal Church in Washington on Monday, Melania and the soon-to-be-47th president seemed almost indistinguishable figures at first.
They were both in long dark coats, the incoming First Lady abandoning the tradition of adopting a bright, vivid color in order to stand out from the crowd.
Instead, Melania took a leaf from the playbook of European haute-couture houses and plumped for monochrome simplicity.
That, plus the hat and an almost masculine line, ensured she stood out against – and apart from – the other Trump women who would inevitably populate the picture.
The silk wool of her coat looked remarkably similar to the fabric favored by Dior for their outwear, while its stiff peak lapels evoked trademark Dolce & Gabbana.
The slanted chic of her two patch pockets on each side were another hallmark of European tailored dressing that has become Melania’s mainstay in recent years.
In quite literally topping off the look with the unconventional choice of a hat (certainly for Americans), she evoked her 2019 meeting with Queen Elizabeth II, when she wore a very similar style (one that then had been designed by Herve Pierre himself).
It also echoed the ceremonial dressing of British royal women, who rarely appear for such a momentous occasion without a showstopping piece of millinery.
Melania’s outfit will, I’m sure, divide opinion. The angular style and dark tones are not what people expect from the traditional American consort.
But she has, I believe, once more confounded her critics. By opting for a design which is assuredly American yet strikingly similar to the European silhouettes that are her sartorial mainstay, Melania has shown not only an independence of spirit but a historical awareness of a playbook mastered by Jackie Kennedy.
Forced by political pressure to abandon Parisian haute couture, Jackie turned an American designer, Oleg Cassini, to recreate her beloved French silhouettes and become, as she later dubbed him, her ‘Secretary of Style’.
It remains to be seen if Adam Lippes will fill such a role.
Monday’s choices certainly open the possibility that, when it comes to fashion at least, Melania has something very different in mind for the next four years.
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