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.