'The most beautiful first lady': The fashion fans who are stoked Melania is back

By Rachel Tashjian / The Washington Post

When Melania Trump becomes first lady for the second time, she may find that her style has a much more vocal fandom than it did eight years ago. Certainly, that’s the case when speaking to editors from a new wave of conservative fashion platforms.

“She’s one of the most beautiful women who’s ever graced the White House,” said Jayme Franklin, the founder and CEO of the Conservateur, which celebrates the fashion and lifestyle of conservatives. “I would say she’s on par with Jackie O. And she has incredible style.”

“Melania Trump is objectively the most beautiful first lady the United States has ever had,” Evie Magazine editor in chief Brittany Martinez wrote in an email earlier this month. “We were supposed to hail Kamala Harris’s Converse, skinny jeans and blazer as relevant and iconic fashion and ignore the literal model in the White House.”

“Whether you’re happy or sad today, there is one truth that remains absolutely unchanged,” TikTok fashion creator Curtis Newbill said in a post the day after the election. “And that is that Melania Trump is the most fashionable, and the most iconic person, to ever step foot in that White House.

Last week, the conservative nonprofit Turning Point shared an Instagram reel of Melania Trump’s outfits that read: “5 more days until the fashion icon is back.”

During Donald Trump’s first administration, his wife’s clothing was a subject of brutal fascination and derision. For many, her style legacy is nothing more than the Zara jacket inscribed with “I Really Don’t Care. Do U?” written on the back, worn during a 2018 visit to detention center for migrant children in Texas.

Some considered it a show of flat-footed cruelty. In her 2024 memoir, Melania says it was a message to her critics in the media.

Even before that, many in the fashion industry gave her the cold shoulder.

“I’m staying away from bringing my brand into politics,” designer Zac Posen told the Daily Beast in 2017.

“I have no interest whatsoever in dressing Melania Trump,” Marc Jacobs told WWD shortly after the 2016 election. “Personally, I’d rather put my energy into helping out those who will be hurt by [Donald] Trump and his supporters.”

While a number of other designers WWD spoke to, such as Diane Von Furstenberg and Thom Browne, were more diplomatic about the opportunity, the industry largely lurched away from Melania during her husband’s four years in office.

Fashion has always leaned left, but Oscar de la Renta and Carolina Herrera were celebrated for collaborating with first ladies from both parties, and Anna Wintour has put both Republican and Democratic first ladies on the cover — each of them since Hillary Clinton, until Melania Trump. She appeared on a Vogue cover in 2005, pre-presidency, to celebrate her wedding to Donald.

Wintour has been a vocal Biden supporter and major fundraiser and was recently recognized with the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Many of Melania Trump’s fans are still annoyed by her Vogue snub: “Melania doesn’t need American Vogue,” Martinez wrote. “If she had graced their cover during Trump’s first term, it would have been the highest selling issue in decades. If they did it now, it would be the predictable and safe thing to do.”

Designers often describe dressing a first lady as a career highlight, and will work closely with her or a stylist to customize a runway design or create something new, which she pays for, often at a discount. (Michelle Obama sometimes accepted clothes as gifts if they were historically significant, like a gown worn for a state dinner, which could then be donated to the National Archives.)

But during Trump’s first term and Joe Biden’s four years in office, designers and magazine editors abandoned even a charade of bipartisanship. When they did work with the incoming first lady, as Ralph Lauren made her blue cashmere dress, jacket and gloves for the 2017 inauguration, those labels were allegedly threatened with boycotts.

Melania’s stylist, Hervé Pierre, told WWD late last year that as a result of the fashion industry’s attitudes, 95% of what she wears is bought off the rack.

“I don’t really do that for the good reason that the fashion industry is not very welcoming [of Trump.] That’s no secret,” he said. “Some are very open-minded and would be able to do something special. But a lot of people are not.”

Whether designers will change their tune remains to be seen when she appears at the inauguration on Monday afternoon, and at the black-tie celebrations later that night.

Still, a more receptive audience, no matter whether designers decide to play ball, is already in place. In addition to Evie and the Conservateur, there are accounts like Our Lady Melania on Instagram and FLOTUS Report on X that provide news and information on her fashion choices.

Franklin and her creative director and co-founder, Isabelle Redfield, said they were inspired to launch their business with their third co-founder and editor in chief Caroline Downey after seeing the negative attention Trump received for her style.

“A huge part of why we started the Conservateur was to cover her and Ivanka,” said Franklin. “There were a lot of beautiful women who worked in the Trump White House and dressed impeccably and were so smart and sophisticated, and just didn’t get their due from Vogue or other fashion magazines because of their conservative beliefs.”

“I think in her first term and again in her second, she is really defining in the modern era what it means to merge diplomacy and fashion,” said Redfield. “Americans can confidently trust her to represent our country on the world stage beautifully every single time, no matter what room she’s in. And I think that anyone, particularly in the fashion industry, that’s unable to acknowledge that, there’s something else there. That’s Trump Derangement Syndrome.”

It is true — to this fashion critic’s eye, anyway — that Melania has sharpened up her look. During her first term in office, she relied on Princess Diana-esque fashion diplomacy, wearing Italian designers like Dolce & Gabbana when visiting Italy, or Chanel couture for a White House state dinner with France in 2018.

She played to the idea of a country or place with a costumish touch: She wore a Chinese-inspired dress by the Italian brand Gucci, the kind of garment that’s usually considered cultural appropriation, for a state dinner in Beijing, and donned a pith helmet for a visit to Africa.

Most fashion critics saw her clothing choices as indulgent, or simply cartoonish. She often wore Calvin Klein (then designed by Belgian Raf Simons) and Michael Kors, but mixed in many more high-end European designers than a first lady, who is often thought of as an advocate for American fashion, usually does. She may be the first and only first lady ever to have a collection of Hermès Birkin bags.

Over the past year, her style has adapted a hard confidence that draws on an old-fashioned idea of European chic. Her priority seems less to tell a story with clothes than to look flawless and composed.

She wore a zebra-print coat by Michael Kors for her husband’s Madison Square Garden rally, and a form-fitting Versace dress befitting a Hollywood starlet at Mar-a-Lago’s New Year’s Eve party. (This look, too, has its moments of exaggeration, as when she wore a $630 Gucci boater to her son’s graduation in Florida.)

She has a particular fondness for Dior, with its hourglass bar jackets that treat the female form as a kind of armor. She likes to re-wear things: the red Dior suit she wore for the Republican National Convention was an ensemble she’s had for seven years, and the Valentino coat she wore to Jimmy Carter’s funeral last week was from 2019.

Melania Trump is often seen as inscrutable, especially when it comes to her style. But Franklin said that the first lady’s sartorial evolution reflects her journey and independence.

“Even though she’s very much categorized as Donald Trump’s wife, she likes to be her own person,” said Franklin. “I see that a lot in her memoir. You can see that in her charting her own journey right now with her documentary. And I think she has been so used to the press putting her in this little box and just ripping her apart and being pretty ruthless with her. Now I think you’re seeing that she’s going to step up and speak her mind and wear what she wants.”

Redfield suspects the fashion industry will soon change its tune.

“I think it’s too bad that we saw politics get in the way for some designers, of the honor of a lifetime of dressing a first lady,” said Redfield.

Regardless, the landscape of Melania Trump commentary is much different from what it was even four years ago, when Breitbart was the only outlet to have a dedicated Melania fashion reporter.

Martinez, who founded Evie Magazine in late 2018, has been basking in the glow of the Trump win. Her magazine, with its more than 177,000 Instagram followers, has garnered over 46 million views on its content over the past 30 days, Martinez wrote.

She describes her magazine’s audience as “ideologically split between conservatives, liberals and moderates,” citing a third-party analysis of its audience records, but its stories touch on many subjects popular among new conservatives, such as stay-at-home mothers (the most recent cover star is the infamous Instagrammer Hannah Needleman, or Ballerina Farm), the backlash against diversity and inclusion efforts and an approach to health and wellness that aligns with the Make America Healthy Again movement.

“For decades, women’s media has been a monolith that has treated women as a monolith,” Martinez wrote in another email this week. “Evie promotes a much more expansive view of femininity, whereas modern feminism (pushed by every other popular women’s media brand) has been very narrow.”

Martinez’s publication plans to continue covering Melania Trump’s clothes. “Evie has celebrated Melania Trump’s beauty and style for years, and will only be covering her more as she assumes her role as first lady a second time,” Martinez wrote.

The Conservateur works closely with Andrea Hanks, who was Melania Trump’s official White House photographer during the first Trump administration, to share exclusive photography of the first lady.

Does the change in presidents reflect anything happening in fashion?

“We always advocate for women to represent themselves with dignity, and you can do that as you choose,” said Redfield. “But I do see in colleges, and on Instagram and everywhere else, more and more women presenting themselves in a more palatable light, one that is worthy of respect, and showing less skin.”

Franklin observes it more generally influencing fashion and lifestyle. Each new president and his spouse mark a shift in American attitudes and aesthetics. Part of a first lady’s role, whether she uses fashion as forcefully as Jackie Kennedy, Nancy Reagan or Michelle Obama, or as reluctantly as Jill Biden, is to help reflect and solidify a national style and mood.

Franklin said Trump’s second arrival is a departure from her time at University of California-Berkeley, from which she graduated in 2020.

“Being a leftist progressive was what was like, ‘cool’ in American culture. And that seemed to be the predominant thing, especially in the fashion and culture spheres, and female media. And now I feel like it’s a completely different culture. It’s kind of gauche and out of style to be this progressive. It’s kind of cooler to be conservative.”