Donald Trump’s second State of the Union, delivered in January 2018, included the specter of immigrant gangs, the importance of saluting the flag, and the glory of his tax cuts, but that’s not what stuck with the viewing public. So many of us had by then grown inured to these monologues. Instead, that chilly Tuesday night is better remembered for his wife, first lady Melania Trump, who entered the room wearing a white pantsuit, shining among the sober Washington palette.
The speculation began immediately. Was it some kind of dig at Hillary Clinton, who favored white pantsuits as a nod to suffragettes, or a comment about this being Melania’s first appearance since the Stormy Daniels scandal broke? Was it somehow about the #MeToo movement?
According to Melania’s old friend Stephanie Winston Wolkoff, it was none of the above. A former Vogue special events director, Winston Wolkoff knew the Trumps from the Manhattan charity gala circuit and was the rare New York society figure who followed them to Washington. She helped plan the inauguration and then settled into a role as an East Wing adviser. She left her post in 2018 as the Trumps’ inauguration spending drew increased scrutiny and allegations of self-dealing. She has said she was thrown under the bus, and in Melania and Me, a memoir released in September, details her front-row seat to the alleged bus throwers’ ascendance to the halls of American power. It was not as if Melania was unaware of the potential message her State of the Union pantsuit might broadcast, Winston Wolkoff told me this summer. The former East Wing adviser tried to dissuade Melania from wearing it, but “the more I begged, the more she laughed it off.”
“Melania doesn’t think about the ‘why’ of her fashion choices and what she is wearing,” Winston Wolkoff said. “She laughs off the press’s attempts to decipher meaning from her clothing.”
It does seem laughable, all this attention on the first lady’s clothes and stagecraft and optics. But that’s so much of politics and especially this particular office, which is as undefined as it is unelected. These women, because they have all been women, have the ear of the president, and they can spend their time in the East Wing largely as they see fit. Almost a full term into her husband’s presidency, Melania has charted a path unique to modern inhabiters of the East Wing. It took her about four and a half months to even occupy the space, which she finally did after hinting early on that she might stay put in New York. Her pet issue, an ill-defined childhood wellness platform, included an anti-bullying pillar—an ironic add-on, to say the least. Her predecessors have been regulars on late-night and morning shows, and have at times lobbied Congress on behalf of their own initiatives, but Melania has taken a more reserved tack. She’s agreed to an interview here and there, but otherwise she lets the photos talk.
Carl Sferrazza Anthony, historian at the National First Ladies’ Library, said the amount of attention paid to what a first lady wears ebbs and flows depending on a number of factors, and all first ladies have contended with it. But the focus is also particular to the family that Melania married into. In Trumpland, image is always the first thing—and for the extraordinarily reticent Melania, it can seem the only thing. For a former-fashion-model first lady, that’s fitting in a neat kind of way. But Melania’s aesthetics are also particularly reflective of her husband’s approach to life and governing. She has a habit of choosing pieces almost too thematically appropriate for the event, so that it comes off like she’s starring in a film about a first lady doing the things first ladies do. Early on, she wore a lumberjack-style shirt while toiling in the White House vegetable garden. She wore a plaid cape, going full Mrs. Claus, to receive a Christmas tree. She wore a cheongsam-style gown to dine alongside Chinese president Xi Jinping. (Gucci, an Italian brand, made the garment.) As she settled into her office, the outfits did not become more nuanced, but deepened into costume. In Kenya, part of her first big solo trip as first lady, she wore a pith helmet, a gesture largely derided as colonialist caricature.
She can go from Out of Africa to Top Gun in an instant too. Whereas her husband tends to want (and succeeded at least once in getting) military vehicles to accompany him at events for that certain je ne sais dictator, it’s Melania who manages the salute-worthy paramilitary look. She wears army green and aviators to greet the troops or visit hurricane cleanup. Speaking at the Republican National Convention in August, she was a banana republic commandant in olive green Alexander McQueen. Over and over, Melania’s style highlights the shortcomings of the administration’s familial contingent, from Ivanka to Jared Kushner to Trump himself. They dress for the job they want when they already have it. In the Trump White House, the campaign never ended, and the actual work never began.
So why, more than three years in, does she still dress as if she’s onstage in five? Melania has largely served as her own style director, according to both Winston Wolkoff and the East Wing chief of staff (and short-lived White House press secretary) Stephanie Grisham, though designer Hervé Pierre helps as well. It’s a job made more difficult by the early rush among some luxury brands, like Tom Ford and Marc Jacobs, to distance themselves from the first lady. Michael Kors made a point to note that if she was wearing one of his items, she bought it at retail. Winston Wolkoff had to lean on relationships with fashion houses from her years producing the Met Gala at Vogue and then marshaling New York Fashion Week at Lincoln Center. “I found myself frequently asking for a favor, not offering one,” she said.
Any attempt to assign meaning to a given outfit, beyond the very obvious, doesn’t take. Melania wore another vaguely militaristic coat to her husband’s third State of the Union in February. Women’s Wear Daily reached out to Pierre and asked if that was some kind of attempted fashion diplomacy, given the designer—Burberry this time. A show of support for England as it tried to extricate itself from the European Union, perhaps?
“It has nothing to do with England or Brexit,” he told the fashion trade. “If I would have to think of all these things when I look at dresses and outfits, I would lose my mind.”
He has a point. The definition of insanity is trying to divine meaning from the first lady’s taste time and again and expecting to find something, anything at all. Melania’s style, as arresting as it is, mostly is just in line with the general Trumpian aesthetic, a kind of American kitsch that privileges gloss over heft, itself over anything else. Winston Wolkoff recalled trying to work with reporters around the inauguration in 2017—for example, arranging an exclusive on the design with WWD, a time-honored fashion tradition. She saw something meaningful in the fact that two immigrants—Melania and Pierre—had designed the inaugural gown together. But mentioning immigration in this context was a nonstarter: “Stephanie Grisham advised Melania not to provide an exclusive to WWD, and that was that.” (“I never shut anything down. Mrs. Trump is in charge,” Grisham told me.)
In her first moments as first lady, Melania had relinquished the chance to shape the narrative. The fashion press and public were left to divine from afar.
There may be one incident when Melania broke from this routine and tried to say something with her clothes. You knew we’d get here eventually: the infamous Zara “I really don’t care. Do u?” jacket. The statement, literally written on her back as she traveled to visit immigrant children separated from their parents by her husband’s administration in 2018, was more confusing than anything. Grisham said at the time that it meant nothing: “It was just a jacket.” Months later the first lady contradicted the official line in a rare interview, telling Tom Llamas of ABC that she continued to wear the jacket because “the media” was “obsessed” with it. In Winston Wolkoff’s telling, it was a troll. She recalls Melania joking, “I’m driving liberals crazy! You know what? They deserve it!”
“The epic failure of that jacket was not that she wore it, but that she, through her press secretary, had the opportunity to explain what the intention was and instead became very defensive,” said Anthony.
Even when Melania’s clothes have had literal words on them, they communicated nothing at all. The outfits are ultimately only symbols, really. They don’t matter in any kind of material sense, especially as we wrap on the first term of a presidency that has hurt so many of those it is duty-bound to protect. But as symbols, they have proven incredibly useful in their way, reminding us time and again that she’s a member of a troupe of upstarts desperate to look the part, playacting at running the country.
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