Free, Melania

by Kate Bennett

  Melania wants everyone to know that she, Melania, picked out her outfit, that it was her decision to wear a certain dress or a suit or a coat. If Pierre gets involved in the shopping, it’s mostly because he has been tasked by her to find something specific or sees something that might work in tandem with one of Melania’s ideas.

  Michelle Obama also liked to make her own choices, but they were choices she was making from a plethora of options that her personal stylist, a young woman named Meredith Koop, had selected already, knowing Michelle’s taste and the occasion. Koop started as a sales associate at Ikram, the iconic Chicago boutique run by Ikram Goldman. Michelle Obama was a regular. When then–senator Barack Obama decided to run for president, Michelle turned to Goldman for help with her wardrobe. By the time Obama entered the White House, the job of helping dress Michelle—by now an icon of style herself—was too big for Goldman to handle alone, so Koop, ever the able assistant, stepped in. Koop has been a thoughtful shopper for Michelle for almost a decade now. It’s Koop’s job to keep her in clothes that not only reflect her taste but also highlight the many facets of fashion design, combining emerging designers with well-known names, high-end price points with affordable ones, and forward-focused sartorial choices.

  Melania didn’t want that. She didn’t want someone else pulling items. One of her favorite pastimes is perusing shopping sites like Moda Operandi, which carries thousands of high-fashion looks and caters to women already thinking of the season ahead of the current one. Or Melania’s most frequent online shopping destination, Net-a-Porter, where she often buys her clothes, just like you or me, or anyone, really, and has them delivered to her home, which, unlike you or me, happens to be the White House. Most of the time, Pierre does the buying for some of the bigger, more important stuff that requires longer-term planning, and when he does Melania receives the packages directly from him. She tries things on, decides what she likes and what she doesn’t, and Pierre or one of his helpers will send back the discards.

  “My role is to dress the First Lady and advise her—I’m not a stylist; I am an adviser, and she is adamant about that,” Pierre has said. “Who, as a free woman, is going to be told what to wear? It’s a conversation, a collaboration. Without intellectualizing, my advice is respectful and it makes sense.” Melania and Pierre have found a vibe that works for them, with Pierre making sure tailoring is impeccable for a dress or a coat, but avoiding being too involved in the acquisition of that dress or coat. He does, however, plan for Melania’s bigger moments: with her, he makes sure her trunks and suitcases are packed with essentials for each of her lengthier trips.

  For the Macrons’ elaborate official arrival ceremony—a fancy deal on the South Lawn of the White House with military bands, flags, marching, anthems, and such—Melania had already selected her outfit. It was a bright white Michael Kors Collection skirt suit with an asymmetrically hemmed jacket and a wide white belt to match, very much in the vein of Melania’s usual sartorial silhouette. She would buy a new pair of Christian Louboutin So Kate stilettos, too, in blue denim with a white patent leather 4.75-inch heel, for $775.

  The ensemble, while good, needed something else, thought Melania. Something extra. Something fabulous. Pierre suggested a hat. Melania agreed.

  Pierre reached out to Michael Kors’s team and asked for several yards of the white suit fabric, as he was commissioning the hat to be specially made—so for those of you who thought at the last minute Melania had decided to add a generous accessory to her outfit, you’re wrong. The hat was planned, well in advance, and it was custom made, by hand, by a hatmaker commissioned by Pierre. Kors is persnickety about Melania wearing his clothes, which she does with frequency. During the presidential campaign, the Manhattan-based designer was a vocal champion of and a donor to Hillary Clinton. When Melania wore her first real headline-grabbing Kors outfit, for Trump’s first special address to Congress a month after his inauguration, the designer had to accept that the new first lady was going to wear his clothes, whether he liked it or not. It’s a free country: the first lady can walk into any store that sells Michael Kors and buy whatever she likes—or order it off the Neiman Marcus Web site.

  Melania entered the Capitol gallery that evening wearing a black belted Michael Kors suit, adorned with delicate sequin flowers. The price tag was just shy of ten thousand dollars. “Mrs. Trump has been a longtime client at our New York boutique. She has a keen understanding of what works best for her and her lifestyle,” said Kors when asked to comment. Translation: she went into the store and bought it like anyone else; I had nothing to do with it. Kors, who tweets constantly when celebrities—who are not Melania Trump—wear his clothes, didn’t do anything to herald the new first lady’s taking a shine to his designs. And he hasn’t since, more than two years into her tenure and more than a dozen significant Kors designs worn by Melania later.

  So it was a bit of a surprise, back to the hat, that he agreed to give Pierre that extra fabric.

  The hat became a defining moment for Melania, who kept it on all day long, even for a tour of the Cézanne exhibition at the National Gallery of Art, which she took with Mrs. Macron. She kept the hat on, even inside. The Washington Post’s Pulitzer Prize–winning fashion critic, Robin Givhan, dedicated an entire column to the hat: “The hat, broad-brimmed with a high, blocked crown, announced the first lady’s presence as boldly and theatrically as a brigade of trumpeters. It was the bright white hat of a gladiator worn on an overcast day, a kind of glamorous public shield when sunglasses would not do at all. That hat was a force field,” Givhan wrote, “that kept folks, the wrong folks, from getting too close.” A “diva crown,” she called it. It was true, the circumference of the thing meant she couldn’t hug tight or kiss beyond a smooch into the air that would hopefully land somewhere near a face. Trump certainly couldn’t get close. But, honestly, as soon as Melania stepped out in that hat, was he even there? I think he gave remarks at the opening ceremony, but no one knew what he said. Cable news panels for once dropped the Trump coverage and started talking about hats and Beyoncé and Olivia Pope.

  Had it been any first lady other than Brigitte Macron that Melania chose to literally and figuratively overshadow with her hat, she might have had some trouble, but Brigitte was #TeamMelania all the way. Nine months earlier, in Paris, Brigitte got a taste of what being married to Trump must be like, in terms of having to conform to his ideal of physical beauty. When they met during their visit on Bastille Day, cameras rolled as Trump looked at the sixtysomething French first lady and objectified her, eyeing her up and down before saying, “beautiful. You’re in such good shape.” He then turned to her husband, several years his wife’s junior, and said, “She’s in such good physical shape.” Like, can you believe it? This older broad is actually a pretty hot piece! The video clip was incredibly awkward to watch—cringeworthy is being kind. I can’t imagine what it must have been like to be there in person, but in that instant Brigitte bonded with Melania, so sympathetic was she to the fact Melania had to be married to this person, or that was how she saw it. Melania, of course, didn’t feel that way and had long ago tried her best not to let her husband’s numerous social gaffes get to her. But she did take it into account when she decided on that hat. While most other first ladies would be annoyed Melania stole their spotlight, Brigitte was basically like, “Go girl.”

  But such is the power of Melania’s clothing choices. They are complex, they are impeccable (mostly), and they often leave Americans with more questions about their first lady than answers.

  Did she wear the white Christian Dior pantsuit to the State of the Union address in 2018 to mess with her husband’s head after news broke of his alleged affair with porn star Stormy Daniels? What does one wear to recover from that sort of public humiliation? A white, “I’m fine—just look at me” suit in a sea of congressional black and navy? Was that the trick? That it harkened to suffragettes and Hillary Clinton and the resistance certainly didn’t hurt either. Melania may not have
been sending up a Bat signal of solidarity, but she certainly didn’t mind if women, or Democrats, or Democratic women, thought she did. I have a theory that when the Trumps are unhappy with each other, Melania wears menswear—because Trump notoriously likes to see women in tight, short, übersexy and feminine dresses. In 2018, Melania wore a lot of pantsuits.

  Pierre had first become acquainted with Melania quite out of the blue, when she cold-called him mere weeks before her husband’s inauguration, asking if he would make her gown. She phoned him early one morning and asked him to send over some sketches of ideas—by 4 P.M. that same afternoon.

  “I was surprised, yes,” Pierre told me. “But I was so excited.” He didn’t know Melania in a personal way. But she had chosen well, because Pierre wasn’t afraid to dress the woman who, for so many in his industry, represented the man that beat their beloved Hillary Clinton. Anna Wintour, the doyenne of fashion, had unabashedly fund-raised and sanctioned the use of Vogue editorial pages in support of Clinton. Other designers had already stated on the record they would not work with Mrs. Donald Trump. Pierre put it to me this way: “The amazing thing about America and about freedom is that if you don’t want to do something, you don’t have to do it!” Born in France, Pierre, who is small in stature and almost always has a flower in the lapel of his jacket and Converse sneakers on his feet, became a United States citizen in August 2016. Dressing the first lady, for him, was an honor beyond compare.

  Pierre’s job might be more complex than that of Michelle Obama’s stylist, because he can’t simply call up any designer in the Rolodex (and neither can Melania) and ask that a dress be made for her for such and such occasion. And that’s because, essentially, the fashion world does not like her, mostly because of her association with her husband. So polarizing is this president that wearing a certain designer, no matter how often Melania is photographed or written about for what she has done, is not an option. No one wants to claim her.

  There have been designers who have said they won’t dress Melania—quite vocal ones at that. Having decided her husband’s politics are not for them and, by extension, therefore neither is she, certain designers would rather forgo the business of dressing a first lady, which used to be considered an honor. Before Trump took office, Tom Ford said on a talk show, “I was asked to dress her quite a few years ago and I declined. She’s not necessarily my image.” It was stinging enough that Trump took notice and remembered: two months later, speaking at a luncheon in Washington in January, he remarked, “Tom Ford came out and said he was not dressing Melania. He was never asked. I never liked him or his designs.” He then gestured to Melania, seated in the audience: “He’s never had something to dress like that.” Marc Jacobs, Zac Posen, Phillip Lim, Sophie Theallet, and Naeem Khan (all avid Michelle Obama designers) have said they would also avoid dressing Melania. It’s not something that Melania particularly cares about, say those who know her. Unlike Michelle Obama, Melania rarely asks designers for customized looks.

  Designer Alice Roi, who dressed Melania in the high-profile custom navy coat she wore for the inaugural weekend prayer breakfast at the National Cathedral, and made her a similarly tailored red coat that March, won’t do so again, because of the backlash she faced after her name was attached to Melania Trump originals. For Roi—who delighted in a round of interviews about dressing the first lady after the inauguration, explaining how Melania favored a “1950s silhouette, in which the waist is emphasized”—the degree to which her business suffered was eye-opening, someone close to Roi tells me. Making it worse, the two women were longtime friends, and Roi was one of the few designers Melania felt truly comfortable working with. Two handmade outfits within three months of each other, both made in collaboration between designer and client, signaled Roi could very well become one of Melania’s go-to couturiers, at least that’s what both envisioned, until Roi faced the wrath of anti-Trump fashionistas. The hit Roi took, both in her revenue and reputation, in the wake of dressing her friend, the first lady, was too much to bear. Melania, gracious as ever, completely understood that Roi would no longer be able to make clothes for her.

  If that stings, and people who know her say it does not, Melania doesn’t show it. She still has a stable of favorites, if a small one (in addition to those Web sites, which don’t discriminate), including Christian Dior, Dolce and Gabbana, Chanel, Raf Simons (when he was with Calvin Klein), Roland Mouret, and of course Ralph Lauren, who custom made her baby blue Inauguration Day suit and several other pieces.

  For her inaugural gown, Melania gave Pierre some words to help him come up with what she wanted—“powder,” “pale blue,” “vanilla”—and she said that, for fit, she wanted it to be tight but also have movement. Basically, she handed him the fashion equivalent of finding the needle in a haystack. They went back and forth for days until they landed on the final sketch of the gown: an ivory, silk crepe, off-the-shoulder column sheath with a high slit in the skirt and a ruffle trim that went to the floor. For a special touch, Pierre and Melania added a thin red ribbon, tied at the waist in a tiny bow. It was modern and simple but laboriously constructed. And it was unlike any other inaugural gown a first lady had worn before, which is how Melania liked it. If she has a sartorial pet peeve, it’s dressing anything like anyone before her has already dressed. The gown now lives in the Smithsonian Museum of American History’s First Ladies exhibition, like several of her predecessors’ gowns. The exhibition is one of the most popular of all the Smithsonian museums in Washington. It not only serves as a historical document of sorts illustrating what the times were like and what was in fashion during each first lady’s tenure but also defines each first lady’s personality. Was she rich and extravagant like Abigail Van Buren’s blue velvet gown suggests? Or modest and practical, like Eleanor Roosevelt’s long-sleeve pink crepe inaugural gown? Was she a follower, which Mamie Eisenhower’s taffeta evening dresses with full skirts and cap sleeves, all the rage in the 1950s, suggest? Or was she a leader, like Nancy Reagan, whose sleek, one-shouldered James Galanos gown broke the mold of flouncy, überfemme dresses?

  The museum collection itself was started back in 1930 by first lady Lou Henry Hoover, President Herbert Hoover’s wife, who was, like Melania, a private person. She preferred to work behind the scenes, once making a painstaking list of every item of furnishings from the James Monroe presidency to preserve for posterity, since Monroe was the first president to move into the rebuilt White House after it had been set on fire by the British during the War of 1812. It was under Monroe that much of the furniture was restored; Lou Hoover thought it important to document his efforts. It was she who first donated her dresses and personal artifacts to what was then the “national museum,” which eventually developed, with her initial assistance, into the Smithsonian it is today.

  Whether clothing is a fair assessment of who a first lady is—and it’s not fair—the world is going to look at what she wears. It just will. We have no royalty, our celebrities are fads, presidents are boring, sartorially, at least, so a nation turns its lonely eyes to the first lady. There’s an innate tendency to judge her by what she is wearing, and it happens whether there’s style there or not. (We still pulled something from Barbara Bush with those pearls, didn’t we?)

  What a first lady chooses to wear speaks to many other components of life that aren’t just about her. It can reflect a mood, hers or the country’s; it can be subject to interpretation, intended or not; it can signal wealth or wealth adjacency. It captures the period of her tenure to such an exacting degree the Smithsonian has an entire section dedicated to first lady fashion in the Museum of American History. A rite of passage—one that Melania performed in 2017—is the induction of the first lady’s inaugural gown into the exhibition. Yet discussing a woman, any woman, via her clothes feels sort of icky in modern times, as does expecting her not only to be smart and cultivate a policy platform but also to reveal her favorite cookie recipe in an issue of Good Housekeeping. When was the last time Melania Trump whipped
up a batch of homemade sweets in the kitchen? Try never.

  In lieu of understanding our current first lady by looking at how she communicates verbally with regularity, makes speeches, does interviews, talks about her feelings, maybe even does push-ups on a late-night talk show or sings carpool karaoke, we are forced to look elsewhere to understand who she is. Reading her clothes and nonverbal clues is a simple method of trying to understand who the person is who’s married to the president of the United States, made even more curious by the fact that president is Donald Trump. In the case of Melania Trump, what she wears, in part because she is unwaveringly stylish and well dressed, is sometimes all we have to analyze what she might be thinking behind those $500 sunglasses. The nonverbal cues Melania gives with clothes have served at times to help us read her feelings, and at others to make them murkier.

  But if Melania gets annoyed at how much people talk about her style, it’s yet another thing she should come to anticipate and get used to. After all, as far back as the 1880s the public and the media were riffing off what a first lady wore. Frances Folsom, the youngest first lady in American history, was twenty-one when she married Grover Cleveland, who was forty-nine, in a White House ceremony (there were almost the same number of years between them as between Melania and Trump). Frances quickly became the talk of the town, wearing dresses many believed were too “revealing,” if revealing meant exposing elbows. Long before Michelle Obama was dragged through fashion think pieces for her affinity for sleeveless dresses, poor Frances was fending off the press for her choices. Frances used a Parisian designer to custom make most of her gowns; some were copied by American dressmakers. The press paid attention to how she adorned her clothes with flowers and her hats with feathers.