Sartorial Politics at Trump Tower
By Tamara Cincik, Founder and CEO of Fashion Roundtable
The Trump family clearly love their clothes. Images of Donald Trump's parents show a couple who habitually dressed up in smart attire on a daily basis. Donald's Scottish mother Mary Anne Macleod Trump, a latter day Gloriana, coiffed her hair with copious amounts of Elnett, accessorised with pearls (much akin to Margaret Thatcher's) and wore colourful Chanel suits. While his father Fred Trump was sharp, with his dark suits, crisp Oxford shirts and bright red ties, immaculately pristine on building sites as he created his building empire across Brooklyn.
A generation later, Donald and his first wife Ivana took the Eighties Yuppie dream of aspiration and quick money to its logical conclusion— he was regularly spotted taking helicopters to their casinos in Atlantic City with increasingly bouffant hair, she was decked out in bling at Upper East Side soirées. But however gilded their lifestyle appeared, did any of us see this leading to Trumps in the White House via Miss Universe and The Apprentice?
President Donald Trump's Inauguration saw Melania, his third wife, in a Ralph Lauren version of the powder blue outfit Jackie Kennedy (the high priestess of WASP style) wore when John F. Kennedy was sworn in. Ivanka and Tiffany Trump both wore white, the colour of US female suffrage (as did Hillary Clinton) and in came an era of fashion as a political force: the American Dream, with accessories. While Clinton was famed for her colour blocked pant suits, the new First Family took their Trump Tower silhouettes direct to Washington. For Trump women, this meant body-con dresses, bare arms, a penchant for capes. The feat of walking from the steps of the White House across a lawn to Friday night helicopters for a Mar-A-Lago getaway, in a rainbow array of patent 5' heeled Louboutins or the sheer bravery of wearing a Big Bird yellow cape with Suffragette purple to visit HM the Queen at Buckingham Palace.
Ivana Trump's eponymous fashion brand closed early in her career as her father's "Advisor to POTUS on job creation + economic empowerment, workforce development & entrepreneurship" (in the words of her Twitter account). But one clear theme across her time in the White House (alongside her stepmother, sister and her brother's partners Lara Trump and Kimberly Guilfoyle) is a collective vision of what women should look like.
Clearly, the Trump women love fashion— arguably more than they like wearing a face mask. What does this vision of womanhood look like? They all sing from the same hymn sheet: feminine, expensive, shining in the spotlight in power-dresses for the male gaze. Americana aspirational for the digital age.
At a time when Roe versus Wade was under real threat of being overturned, a new kind of populism entered Western political narratives where the distinctions of parallel truths and fake news were never more blurred. Aspirational dressing as a vernacular for conservatism had a modern twist to it: the Zara "Really Don't Care, Do U" jacket worn in to visit refugee children separated from their mothers in a detention centre and a pith helmet, last seen in Zulu!, worn for Melania's solo tour of Africa (where she explained to Tom Llamas from ABC News that she is the most trolled person on the internet), do hint at a stylist's moodboard and large budgets, rather than a throw it on that morning approach to her wardrobe.
Where did we last see this before? The power of fashion has always been important to communicating values, to reach the spotlight, to inspire aspiration (and sometimes fear). In many ways, this is timeless: from Henry VIII's ever-growing cod piece at odds with his concerns about gaining a male heir, to the wardrobes for Hulu's The Handmaid's Tale. Like the Trump family, this dystopian future likes a woman in a cape. While the Handmaids such as the heroine June/Offred, walk in twos to the supermarket in red capes worn with starched white bonnets which impede their view, while plotting for freedom; the Wives are members of an elite with the clothes to match. Dressed in a uniform colour palette of teal, Serena and the Wives are a vision of expensive femininity in long capes, sweeping dresses with 1950's silhouettes. They are also women who have led to the creation of a mythical version of America, Gilead— a place where other women are silenced and their agency is reduced to their fertility or status in relation to their spouses. The Wives wear the blue of purity, from the Virgin Mary; the Handmaids wear red, from the blood of menstruation, but also from Mary Magdalene. Margaret Atwood said of the novel: "One of my rules was that I would not put any events into the book that had not already happened in what James Joyce called the 'nightmare' of history, nor any technology not already available. No imaginary gizmos, no imaginary laws, no imaginary atrocities. God is in the details, they say. So is the Devil."
Basic civil liberties were endangered under the Trump presidency, along with many of the rights for women that were won over the past decades, indeed centuries. This climate in which hate for many groups seems on the rise and scorn for democratic institutions normalised, showed that while the devil is in the detail, it is the details we must look to for evidence.
It is by decoding the language that people use to communicate with their clothes (especially for those who hire stylists adept at using clothes as a platform) we can see where values are at the heart of a narrative. Compare and contrast the body-con dresses, capes and stilettos with the Converse, jeans and jackets sported by Kamala Harris. In her, we see the women we pass on the street, dashing from meetings to after school clubs: an extraordinary woman dressed like everywoman. The glass ceiling has been smashed by the first female and WOC Vice President of the United States, who dresses like us and, in doing so, communicates hope and inclusion.