The emptiness of Ivanka Trump's green Dior suit

Class rage, nostalgia, the cruel fantasy of haute couture, and the problem of writing about politics and fashion.

When Christian Dior debuted his Bar suit, in 1947, women went crazy. The editors sitting front row at his debut cooed over the fantastical hourglass silhouette — the cinched waists and padded hips, the full skirts and rounded shoulders. They swooned over the yards and yards of exquisite wool and exotic ivory silk shantung. Dior, a mild-mannered former art dealer, was inspired by the lavish Belle Epoque fashions worn by his mother, and his nostalgia-soaked vision of hyper-femininity struck a chord with the fashion press, who felt famished for beauty coming out of World War II, when hunger and rations and bombings and raids and deportations and death left them all demoralized.

Dior himself wanted to escape the horrors of the war: His beloved younger sister, Catherine, was a member of the Resistance and survived a harrowing series of concentration camps.¹ His first collection delivered that escape: Carmel Snow, of Harper’s Bazaar, dubbed Dior’s vision the “New Look” and went about promoting it far and wide.²

But for some Parisians — starved, ravaged, cold, devastated from the Nazi Occupation of their country and the effects of war — Dior’s extravagant confections provoked outrage. During a photo shoot in Montmartre, a group of ladies attacked a young fashion model wearing Dior, ripping the decadent ensemble off her body. The British novelist Nancy Mitford³ half-joked that she was scared to wear Dior in the streets of Paris. Yet she admitted she felt an illicit thrill swanning about swathed in layers of rich fabric like a princess, inciting the ire of the city’s downtrodden.

“You pad your hips & squeeze your waist & skirts are to the ankle — it is bliss,” she wrote to a friend in December of 1947, about the controversial look. “So then you feel romantic like [French socialite and Proust muse] Mme Greffulhe & people shout ordures [garbage] at you from vans because for some reason it creates class feeling in a way no sables could.”

I thought about Miss Mitford’s blithe, but incisive, observation as I looked at photos from Donald Trump’s inauguration weekend. Both wife Melania and daughter Ivanka wore Dior couture to different events — with Ivanka wearing a replica of Dior’s original skirt suit to the ceremony, in forest green wool.

When Ivanka introduced her father at the Republican National Convention the first time around, in 2016, she opted for a basic beige $156 sheath from her own mass-market fashion line, the kind of thing a normal working girl would wear to the office and then to drinks after. For her father’s second inauguration, last Monday, she squeezed into a corseted French couture jacket, and teetered about in a voluminous padded skirt that accentuated her hips. She finished off her ensemble with a leather Lady Dior bag (between $5k and $7k) and a matching mini beret that made her look like European royalty.

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For the inaugural ball, she chose another French couture label, Givenchy, which made her a copy of a floofy fairytale gown Audrey Hepburn wore in the 1954 film Sabrina. Escape indeed.

Audrey Hepburn in a white Givenchy gown, posing with a pair of standard poodles for the film Sabrina (1954).

When I was a reporter at a daily newspaper, I used to write a lot about the clothes that politicians and their spouses and family members wore. I would scrutinize the outfits at an inauguration, a dinner, a ball, a convention and come up with something to say about them. What did these ensembles reveal about these public figures, what were they trying to tell us?

I started my journalism career in 2008, and I went to Barack Obama’s first inauguration in 2009 — mainly to hang out with my sister, who lived in the DC area at the time, but also to file a story about the bar scene that weekend for Forbes’ (now-defunct) “Beltway” blog.⁴ The Obamas were very aware of their image, and Michelle, as First Lady, particularly used clothing to communicate specific messages to the world. Both of them were an aspiring fashion commentator’s dream.

For that first inauguration she wore a springy lemongrass lace coat by the Cuban-American designer Isabel Toledo and then a floaty white sleeveless gown festooned with flowers by the Asian-American designer Jason Wu. Both outfits were light and hopeful. Both were created by independent American designers who were also immigrants. Both promised a new vision of the U.S.: one that was more open, diverse, and rooted in optimism instead of fear. (I’m not going to litigate Obama’s legacy here: I’m just focusing on how he and Michelle used clothing to sell themselves to the American people.)

Later, I wrote about Hillary Clinton’s pantsuits and suffragette white during the campaign trail in 2016, Melania Trump’s trollish pussy-bow blouses, Ivanka’s RNC dress, Kamala Harris’s Chuck Taylors, on and on and on.⁵

But lately, trying to divine meaning into what American politicians (and their family members) wear seems … pointless, fruitless, a vain excercise? After the 2020 election, President Joe Biden and First Lady Jill largely eschewed the kind of sartorial political theater that the Obamas embraced. (FLOTUS dutifully wore American designers, and many independent ones, but seemed mostly concerned about looking good than sending a message.) In 2024, Democratic nominee and Vice President Kamala Harris shied away from using clothes to make obvious points about politics or femininity, despite the fashion media desperately trying to make her some kind of style icon.

The Trump ladies, by contrast, actually seem to love fashion, or at least clothes. They obviously delight in playing dress up, especially after the industry largely shunned them during the first Trump presidency. You could certainly read Ivanka’s retro looks — and Usha Vance’s as well, from her pink inauguration coat to the tight velvet strapless gown she wore to a dinner to the sequined spangled pageant number she sported at a ball — as signaling a return of hyper-femininity, a fantasy of a time (that never really existed, by the way) when men were men and women were women. A time when women suffered and took pains to wear the latest fashions, when as Dior assistant Pierre Cardin told journalist Justine Picardie, “even the thinnest girl, she had to breathe in for the Bar jacket.”⁶ It was a fantasy: Audrey Hepburn in Sabrina playing a chauffeur’s daughter who captures the heart of a rich playboy (and his more sober brother). Something far away from reality.

And yet, it also seemed somehow simpler, pettier than that. What do these clothes say? I’m pretty. I’m popular. I’m rich. I’m a movie star (like Audrey Hepburn), a celebrity, and I have my pick of the finest clothes in the world.

Maybe this is uncharitable of me, but as I looked at these figures — not just the Trumps and Vances but also the Arnaults, the billionaire French family who run the luxury behemoth that owns Dior, LVMH — I saw a bunch of Nancy Mitfords, flagrantly, meanly flaunting their wealth, their beautiful luxurious clothes, as the rest of us struggling plebes looked on.

1. A biography about Catherine, called Miss Dior: A Story of Courage and Couture, by Justine Picardie was published a few years ago.

2. I recommend this delightful book on Carmel Snow; she was quite a character!

3. One of the famous Mitford sisters (and also a brilliant, funny writer)

4. I really don’t remember anything about the story except that it required sampling a lot of what D.C. bartenders were calling “Baracktails.”

5. Not linking to these because they’re too embarrassing!!!

6. From Miss Dior: A Story of Courage and Couture