Trump promised to return America to civility and brilliance. That the people in his circle are doing so through their clothing makes the internet angry.
It was just four years ago that we suffered through the fashionable weirdness of the Biden opening. With no annual balls to attend because of Covid mania, the biggest fashion statements were made by Lady Gaga, whose outfit looked like a Hunger Games version of those beehive-shaped Barbie cakes, and Ella Emhoff, whose tweed pilgrim look and following model contract were created in a lab to communicate to people that unpleasant is the new fairly.
It’s been fashionable for a while to reject conventional beauty standards, whether that means putting the defiant obese on journal addresses or writing articles like this:
Fashion and the arts have long sought to become rebellious, but the administrative record of the arts by fashionable Marxists has turned offending the senses into a, also, art form. Things that normies think are strange — like Ella Emhoff’s attempt to turn elbow hair into a fashion accessory — are celebrated by the editors at fashion magazines precisely because they offend all of those ordinary people of modest minds and smaller towns who voted for Trump.
See also: A freak with chest hair in a skirt and 2-inch nails got invited to the Biden White House to be a “Gen Z intern ” for a day, and landed a spot in Vogue for it.
Then, on Monday, Melania Trump dared to show up looking not just not weird, but belligerently not so. With its intense lines and visor-like millinery, her no-nonsense costume would have fit well into the military-inspired trends of the 1940s. It reminded me of the impeccably dressed Nazi chick who fought Indiana Jones for the Holy Grail — a comparison which The New York Times would probably hold against Melania personally if they noticed it.
It’s true that most inaugural outfits tend on the conservative side, if for no other reason than the frigid January temperatures provide an incentive to cover up. ( This year, Jeff Bezos’ fiancée Lauren Sánchez took advantage of the ceremony’s indoor nature to unburden herself of that limitation. ) Like Melania, the other women in the presidential party were dressed in muted monochrome and simple, flattering silhouettes. The Trump women and Mrs. Vance— whose coat The Washington Post described as “1960s-ish” — all donned such classic looks that the Post declared they had put “the fashion in old-fashioned. ”
The New York Times faulted Mrs. Trump for daring to look too regal, describing her look as “less elevated accessibility than British royal walkabout. ” The Post had a similar critique of Ivanka, saying she “looked more like she was heading to a British royal’s wedding in the 1990s than a 2025 celebration of democracy. ” How fascist and undemocratic of them!
And then there were the Inaugural Ball gowns. The six women onstage — Melania, Ivanka, Lara, Tiffany, and Kai Trump, and Usha Vance — painted a patriotic color palette with one in red, one in blue, and the rest in varying shades of champagne and white.
Ivanka’s Givenchy reproduction of Audrey Hepburn’s famous gown in Sabrina was a literal throwback, but all the gowns, as the Times observed, “called to mind eras gone by ” and nodded to the American “golden age” that Trump heralded in his speech earlier the same day.
Lest it come across as praise to describe the parade of glamour as “a sartorial tour through the iconography of celluloid Americana, ” the Times ended on this ominous note:
A little taste of the … well, taste that will define the next four years. So bedazzled that for the moment, no one talked about the festering divides and discontent that brought the first Gilded Age to an end.
Vogue complained that Ivanka’s “nod to upbeat Hollywood glamour, on [a ] stage that holds so much weight for Americans, felt misguided. ” How dare we have any fun or optimism around here, with democracy dying and all!
The Post’s fashion critic, who called Monday’s looks “largely devoid of glamour” and “stodgy, ” compared the aesthetics of Trump’s second inauguration to those of Reagan’s second, which was also held indoors. Evidently forgetting that Reagan’s winning message that year was “Morning in America, ” she wrote these two lines:
“The golden age of America begins right now, ” Trump said in his inaugural speech.
Yet on the stages at inauguration events and on the streets of Washington, things looked less like a new future and a lot like the 1980s.
Clearly she has never met someone who grew up in the 80s, because they will all tell you it was America’s golden age. After more than eight years of hearing Trump’s famous slogan, these people are still missing what everyone else loves about it. The slogan’s fourth word exists because the people who say it believe America has already produced greatness, and they want to protect it from those who would give, explain, or deny it away.
“Style, for this second administration, is looking back, ” she complained.
On that point, she’s kind of right. The coats, gowns, and hats on parade Monday brought back a refreshing dose of old-fashioned glamour and Americana. It’s a shame we can’t agree that ’s a good thing.
Elle Purnell is the elections editor at The Federalist. Her work has been featured by Fox Business, RealClearPolitics, the Tampa Bay Times, and the Independent Women’s Forum. She received her B. A. in government from Patrick Henry College with a minor in journalism. Follow her on Twitter @_ellepurnell.
