Free, Melania

by Kate Bennett

  Frances, like Melania and Michelle, was young, beautiful, and stylish—catnip for an anxious public in need of someone to tear at. Her necklines often exposed what prudish observers thought was too much décolleté, but younger women in America took to copying her, ditching the bustles on the backs of their skirts and tailoring skinnier straps on their shoulders, happy that the first lady was shaking off stuffier “rules” about the amount of skin that was acceptable to show.

  Frances also did what Melania apparently cannot do, which is help her husband dress for his … girth. Cleveland was a big man, but with Frances’s help, he changed the cut of his suits to help hide his midsection. Melania clearly has had little effect on Trump’s style, which consists of three basic looks: work Trump (oversize dark suit, white shirt, ridiculously long red tie), sporty Trump (white polo shirt, red MAGA hat, long Bermuda shorts), and casual Trump (open-neck button-down shirt, windbreaker, red or white MAGA hat, pleated khakis).

  Clearly, this is why it’s more interesting to stay in first lady style territory.

  Melania and Michelle Obama will likely both bear the legacy that Frances Cleveland did, at least in part. Frances was America’s first real first lady remembered for being stylish. Like it or hate it, Frances’s clothes gave people something to talk about, and the press was grateful.

  Grace Coolidge was another first lady who paved the way for the rest of American women, wearing the drop-waist flapper dresses of the mid-1920s while first lady, showing everyone else it was okay to do so. She embraced sportswear and, with it, the notion that women could and should be athletic. Grace wore pants, too. And cut her hair into a bob. She was modern and cool, and her style reflected as much. Where Grace was edgy and sporty, other first ladies, like Mamie Eisenhower, were girly and feminine. Mamie was a different kind of trendsetter for America, with her “Mamie Pink” everything (flowers, dresses, the White House private residence, which reporters dubbed the “Pink Palace”); because of Mamie, pink really became the “girl” color, such was the power of her influence. Mamie was also a bit kooky and kitsch with her clothes. When Dwight Eisenhower had a kickoff picnic for his reelection campaign in 1956, Mamie wore a dress with a giant print reproduction of the White House on the bodice, which was repeated on the pleated skirt. Her purse was embroidered with a symbolic elephant.

  Jackie Kennedy was no doubt paying attention to all that style influence, good and bad, as it was she who got the world obsessed with the fashion of first ladies—where once it was a hobby or a light aside to a political piece about a president, with Jackie clothes became a calling card. Jackie was smart about it, too, creating a movement with her look that lent fortitude to her husband’s vision of youthful exuberance. If Mamie was dainty in grandma’s pink sparkles and tight curls, Jackie was chic in her mohair jackets and knee-length skirts and stylish brunette bouffant. Jackie cultivated a relationship with her favorite designer, Oleg Cassini, who would be instrumental in preparing her looks, be they for a state dinner or a White House social function. Cassini was her personal couturier, meaning he created her clothes, and as such was informally dubbed the Secretary of Style, an ancillary member of Kennedy’s cabinet.

  Jackie in 1960 wrote Cassini a letter asking if he was sure he wanted to commit to being her fashion designer. “ARE YOU SURE YOU ARE UP TO IT, OLEG?” Jackie wrote to him in capital letters, adding her joy that he would even entertain what could be undue criticism from a zealous public. “One reason I am so happy to be working with you is that I have some control over my fashion press, which has gotten so vulgarly out of hand,” she wrote. “You realize that I know that I am so much more of fashion interest than other first ladies.” Jackie also wanted the clothes Cassini designed exclusively for her to be hers alone, no mass knock-offs. “I want all of mine to be original and no fat little women hopping around in the same dress,” she wrote in the same letter. Melania must not care about such a thing, because anyone with the money can buy at least 70 percent of the items she has worn as first lady.

  But Jackie’s letter to Cassini also includes sentiments that Melania might relate to, all these decades later. Though Melania may or may not deal with the scrutiny better than Jackie did, she too thinks of her fashion as protection, armor from a world examining her every move. “Protect me,” Jackie wrote to Cassini, “as I seem so mercilessly exposed and don’t know how to cope with it.”

  Cassini’s background was dressing Hollywood starlets (he once had a love affair with Grace Kelly), which made it even savvier of Jackie to think to make him her dresser, adopting a built-in celebrity element to her entourage. Like Melania, Jackie understood the power of aspirational fashion and was keenly aware that a designer or an outfit could elicit flattery or garner prestige at a public appearance, a visit to a foreign nation, or a “casual” moment at home. Clothes, Jackie understood, were the armor or the costume, the billboard or the subliminal message.

  Melania’s personal adviser Pierre has had many more hits than misses with Melania. For her first international viewing as American first lady, joining her husband on a lengthy trip abroad, Melania plotted her approach several weeks in advance, calling on Pierre to prep outfits for at least twelve public events on the nine-day trip. With each stop, the world got to know a bit more about this mysterious first lady who wasn’t afraid to wear expensive labels—and no American ones, at that—and who was clearly aware that how she dressed and was photographed were paramount since otherwise she was going to be nothing other than an accoutrement to her husband on the trip. Traditionally, first ladies will showcase American designers as much as they can, especially on trips abroad. Michelle Obama was particularly good at selecting designers who were American but had origin in or connection to the country she was visiting. Melania has little care for those sorts of rules—again, she’s not prone to doing anything that feels inauthentic to her, even if that means wearing an international designer in Trump’s “America First” world.

  Pierre also designs custom pieces for Melania: in addition to the inaugural gown, Melania wore a Pierre original as she departed Washington with Trump for that first trip abroad. He had made her a high-waisted orange leather skirt with white piping. Another leather pencil skirt by Pierre would be worn by Melania months later, this one in chestnut brown to match the colors of autumn at the White House Thanksgiving turkey pardon. It was his original green dress design with a shawl collar and belted waist that Melania wore the first time she and Trump hosted the king and queen of Jordan at the White House. Entire articles were written about what Melania was doing or not doing to promote the cause of “fashion diplomacy,” a phrase that Michelle Obama had raised to an art form during her eight years in office. Did she wear green because it’s in the Jordanian flag? Or did she just like green? As usual, everyone would have to settle with the gray area because Melania would not do interviews about her clothes or anything else, thank you very much. Previous first ladies have done more press, more glossy magazine interviews, more open discussion about sartorial pressure or choices. Melania? No thank you.

  The truth, however, falls somewhere in between. Did she contemplate the green because of its association with the country’s flag? Certainly. Did she pick it just because of that? Not likely. Does she want the king and queen of Jordan to think she did? Yep.

  When Melania’s official first lady portrait was unveiled, think pieces were written about how she wasn’t wearing an American designer. Instead, she wore a black suit by the Italian design house Dolce and Gabbana. But, honestly, what most people were staring at in the portrait wasn’t the suit but the huge diamond ring—her upgraded 25-carat emerald-cut engagement ring that Trump had given her two years before to mark their ten-year wedding anniversary. It is fifteen carats more than the original—one carat for every year she had been married to him, plus five for extra measure.

  For Melania’s first official state dinner, with the Macrons, she did what was anticipated, selecting a haute couture Chanel gown, one of two she asked to be se
nt to her to choose from. At the last minute, she opted for the one she wore, a long, sleeveless dress, simple in silhouette but covered in silver sequins and hemmed in lace at the bottom. On the Chanel haute couture runway, the look was originally shown as a jumpsuit, which Melania had toyed with wearing, but she went with the gown version, which likely cost over $100,000, as one-of-a-kind pieces from Chanel often do.

  Price doesn’t necessarily seem to matter much to Melania when it comes to her clothes—I was the one who first noticed she had selected a $680 Balmain plaid shirt for her debut public foray (the only one so far) into Michelle Obama’s beloved White House kitchen garden. But unlike Michelle, whose very adept longtime stylist, Meredith Koop, would pluck selections for the first lady, hyperaware of the situational atmosphere of each event, Melania for the most part wears off-the-rack items, which is fashion speak for “you can buy them in a store or online, just like anyone else.” Koop would no sooner put Michelle Obama in a $680 plaid shirt in the garden with kids from an inner-city D.C. school than she would in jeans for a state dinner.

  Michelle’s everyday looks and dresses typically didn’t retail in their original form for more than a few hundred dollars. But Koop, knowing her boss’s preferences and what looked best on her figure, would often have the dresses modified and customized. Sometimes that meant turning a dress with sleeves into one without or a sheath into an A-line, a mini into a midi. The designers were only too happy to oblige. Unlike Melania, Michelle was worshiped by the fashion crowd; she had the sartorial power to literally make a career—as she essentially did for designers like Jason Wu, Prabal Gurung, and Tanya Taylor, among others. The Koop-requested customization meant the price would be higher, but many designers would trip over themselves to design for Obama, so they would often be generous and not charge exorbitant amounts.

  Which brings us to the rules about first ladies and clothes. It’s a sort of a fuzzy area of ethics, but the basic gist is that first ladies are prohibited from accepting clothes for free, per government finance rules. However, they can accept free garments for one-off, very special occasions, as long as the item in question is then donated to the National Archives after it has been worn. As such, most of the first lady state dinner gowns were “donated” by designers. Anything else a first lady wears must be purchased on her own, with her own personal money. Again, it’s another weird rule of the job that reeks of unfairness. Here the first lady is supposed to be impeccably dressed for each public occasion, ostensibly to look good representing the country and her husband, but really so a catty public can dissect every stitch. And yet everything she wears she has to pay for out of her own pocket. For women like Melania, whose clothing budget has always been on the high side of generous, this isn’t necessarily a problem—and good for her, because unlike Michelle, who oftentimes received generous markdowns from designers, Melania never gets a price break from Seventh Avenue.

  Fashion was something Melania had always been thoughtful about, and over her almost two decades with Trump, she had gone from sexpot slips with too much décolletage to tailored suits, smart jackets, and coat dresses. And coats that aren’t dresses—just coats. In the fall and winter of 2018 and early 2019, Melania would be photographed in more than twenty different coats at various public events. She had several of the same color, blue being a favorite, and for one spell of about five weeks, wore seven different coats, all in varying shades of plaid.

  Melania has pretty much single-handedly brought back the coat as principal player, not just an accessory to be added later. She has coined her own twist by regularly wearing one of her $2,000 cashmere coats and not even fully putting it on, leaving it resting on her shoulders, her arms at her sides and not through the sleeves. It’s the ultimate “rich person” move. If you’re balancing your coat on your body, you can’t really use your arms or the coat would fall off. So all the things you need arms for—opening the car door, carrying groceries or your children, driving a vehicle, toting shopping bags, and more—you either don’t need to do or don’t have to do.

  One of the outfits Melania worked on the most was the one she wore to be introduced to the world as first lady of the United States. The baby blue Ralph Lauren dress with the matching cropped jacket—the one that when most people saw her step out in it they whispered one word: Jackie.

  True, it was reminiscent of Jackie Kennedy’s style, but Melania had a clear idea of what she wanted, and no comparison was going to stop her from seeing her vision through. “She knew the fabric, the fit, the color. She even knew the shoe she wanted and the exact heel height,” one of Melania’s close friends tells me. “She knew that a hat would not work, but that gloves in the same shade of blue would.” The friend tells me that Melania designed the look in collaboration with Ralph Lauren himself, along with members of his team. Of course, for most of the campaign, Hillary Clinton had worn Ralph Lauren suits, which would have made Melania’s choice of him for her inaugural look a little bit odd, if it weren’t for the fact that Lauren was the iconic American designer, so it felt like less of a personal jab. Lauren, philosophically, doesn’t have a partisan feel for designing; his team designed for Clinton, and they just as easily designed for Melania.

  Melania has morphed her style into what I like to call “Lady Melania,” the farthest cry from what she looked like in those naked modeling pictures, splayed out on a carpet. There are three components to “Lady Melania” looks. One: hair up. She wears her hair up for very lady-important occasions and meetings. Examples: Inauguration Day; meeting Pope Francis, the queen of England, the emperor of Japan; when wearing Dior in Paris (because that’s almost as iconic as meeting a pope or a queen); and, again, wearing Dior in Paris (she’s done it twice). Two: wearing gloves. Examples: Dior in Paris, funerals of important people (the Reverend Billy Graham), at Buckingham Palace for a state banquet, and when the coat is just too good not to add a matching glove. Three: Christian Dior outfits. Examples: to meet royalty (Prince Harry and the aforementioned queen, the emperor of Japan), galas (the Red Cross gala at Mar-a-Lago), on important trips (her first international trip with the president), any trip to Paris, unveiling her first Christmas decorations at the White House.

  Another interesting thing Melania does that is unlike her predecessors when it comes to her clothes (and fashion diplomacy, those words again) is purposefully not wear designers associated with the places she is visiting but rather wear clothes that in some small way resemble the culture of where she is going. Michelle Obama would often plan to wear designers from the countries she visited or from the countries of visiting leaders. For the India State Dinner, Michelle picked Naeem Khan, who is American of Indian descent. When the Obamas hosted President Xi Jinping of China, Michelle Obama commissioned a gown from Vera Wang. Visiting England, she wore Roksanda Ilinčić, a London-based designer, as well as Peter Pilotto, again, a British designer. Hosting the leader of South Korea, she wore an outfit by Korean-American Doo-Ri Chung. And so on.

  Melania doesn’t showcase particular designers as did Obama, who championed them to the point of shifting the bottom line of the fashion industry by the billions, according to some studies. Rather, she picks according to the place, whether her Felliniesque Dolce and Gabbana floral jacket in Sicily; the floor-length Gucci gown, trimmed in pink fur with a floral pattern, that looked very similar to a cheongsam, a traditional Chinese dress, worn to a state dinner hosted by President Xi in China; a simple black coat tied with a thick silk belt, reminiscent of an obi, in Japan at a dinner with the Abes, or, the next evening, a long gown by Valentino, in bold red, the emblematic color of the Japanese flag; or a custom-made suit jacket and skirt, designed by Christian Dior in echo of the original Dior silhouette of the 1960s, an homage to the design house’s seventieth anniversary, when in Paris for the first time as first lady.

  * * *

  Mordechai Alvow was born in Israel, but when he was in his twenties, he moved to Los Angeles with the hopes of doing hair for celebrities. Within a few months, he wa
s. (It was the late eighties, and he landed no bigger name, with no bigger hair, than the lead singer of the band Whitesnake, David Coverdale.) Alvow built a loyal clientele after moving to New York, where through the years he has often been sought after for editorial photo shoots for magazines. He met Melania Trump thirteen years ago on an assignment for Japan Vogue. The magazine wanted a bridal photo shoot with Melania, photographed at Mar-a-Lago. The two hit it off right away, and she loved what he did with her brunette locks. Before he left that day, an assistant got his contact information, and soon he was Melania’s go-to stylist.

  They would collaborate for years before Melania’s big move to the White House, which, of course, Alvow made with her, at least in terms of her hair. When Alvow can’t be in Washington, Melania will fill in with someone local to do the regular, simple blow-dry, but Alvow is typically with her for every major event. When Melania returned from Asia, I flew with some members of the press on her plane home. Unloading at the White House, late at night by the south doors, one of the vans was filled with relatively small and different sized Louis Vuitton luggage. I assumed they belonged to the first lady, which they did, but they were labeled for Mordechai, who had come along on the Asia trip and needed his styling tools. He did the same when Melania went on her first big solo trip abroad, to Africa in October 2018. To anyone else, he appeared a regular member of her entourage, but I had long ago started to follow his Instagram page and can always spot Mordechai—he is tall, skinny, and handsome, with salt-and-pepper hair and a warm, friendly grin. At an orphanage in Kenya where Melania stopped to visit, her staff all held babies in the nursery—and Mordechai did, too, cradling a tiny infant in his arms, smiling and cooing. We made eye contact and he looked at me and looked at the baby, Can you believe this?