How the fashion industry is adapting to Trump 2.0

On the night of the inauguration, as revelers filed into the Commander-in-Chief Ball to await the arrival of the new president of the United States, Fox News host Jeanine Pirro was buzzing.

Donning a ballgown and speaking on air with Sean Hannity, she marveled at the elegance of Melania Trump.

“She is an icon. And it’s about time America — you know the magazines, the designers — recognize she is one of the most magnificent first ladies,” Pirro said.

“She’s so far past Jackie O at this point. We’ve got four years of spectacular elegance, class and a real love for fashion.”

In 2025, with Donald Trump storming back to the White House with the second most votes in US history, remaking American politics and culture in his image, Pirro’s demand that the fashion industry recognize the Trumps’ return has a better chance of success than ever.

The ground is fertile for a MAGA takeover of American culture, a consequence of the great normalization of Trump. Having beaten two impeachments, a raft of criminal convictions and opposition from America’s mightiest institutions, Trump has proven himself to be truly ineradicable.

Add to that zeitgeist cocktail the passage of time: younger Americans who came of age in the era of Trump no longer see him as a dangerous outlier. To many of them, he’s an icon of the counterculture, a raffish meme in the streaming age.

“Trump is cool now,” one editor of a leading fashion magazine lamented to me, having been granted anonymity to bitch freely. “It doesn’t mean that I like Trump. It does mean that I don’t think that Melania is evil. But Trump is cool.

“MAGA is the culture right now,” this person added. “It’s grotesque. But it’s un-ignorable.”

During this year’s inauguration, the Trumps were treated to more generous coverage from the fashion world than ever before. Vogue posted glamorous photos on its Instagram and covered the fashion online. Of Melania’s appearance at the inaugural ball, the New York Times’s veteran fashion critic Vanessa Friedman wrote that her gown “elegantly called to mind the Parthenon, Erté and a question mark, all at once.” Ivanka, meanwhile, “channeled Audrey Hepburn” in Givenchy. “She looked lovely, in a cosplay kind of way,” Friedman wrote (she couldn’t resist a few jabs). “Now that’s what I call First Lady Fabulous!” gushed British high-society magazine Tatler. “Melania Trump leads the pack of best-dressed guests at President DonaldTrump’s inauguration.”

Perhaps most notably, Kim Kardashian approvingly posted a photo of Melania at her husband’s swearing-in ceremony — the first lady donned a ludicrously wide-brimmed hat and austere suit — to her 358 million Instagram followers. The Guardian had described her ensemble as “authoritarian chic.”

Much has changed since 2017, when fashion labels and publishers boycotted the new administration, denying Melania and Ivanka in particular the kind of hagiographic magazine coverage and attention from major label designers typically afforded to members of the first family.

The cultural boycott was particularly stark given the made-for-magazines life and looks of Trump’s wife and daughter, and his own symbiotic relationship with the media. It sparked the wrath of the president’s supporters, who demanded to know why this aberrant leader was being treated aberrantly by the press.

Throughout the first term, the Trump administration was treated by the fashion industry as a tacky invasion of barbarian rubes desecrating even the lowly cultural tastes of Washington, DC. The period’s sartorial highlights ranged from Sean Spicer’s ill-fitting gray suit (an outfit so bad it invited a furious takedown from GQ) to micro-celebrity Joy Villa’s gaudy ballgown fashioned out of a MAGA flag.

Melania infamously donned a jacket emblazoned with “I really don’t care, do u?” during a visit to a migrant child detention center. The president himself wore his navy suits baggy and his red ties low. His pants pooled around his ankles; he kept his ties in place with Scotch tape.

Yet the Resistance had only a few years in it. The massive cultural realignment that turned Trump — gasp — cool has trickled down through the MAGA movement and paved the way for more mainstream acceptance of the first family.

Vogue’s coverage of the inauguration may be a taste of what’s to come. Its Instagram posts — glamorous shots of Ivanka and Jared, Melania and Donald, Usha Vance and J.D. — showed an administration being dressed by the biggest houses in fashion.

One fashion editor I spoke to speculated that Vogue’s coverage of the inauguration was a way to “test the waters” and see if their audience would be open to more hospitable coverage of the first family.

If that was the plan, the response was resounding. Under an Instagram post comparing Ivanka to Audrey Hepburn there are hundreds of furious comments. One of the most “liked” read: “RIP Audrey Hepburn, you would have hated Ivanka Trump.”

Under another post of Melania and Usha, the most-liked comments accused Vogue of seeking to “normalize” the new administration. “What’s next? A retrospective of Eva Braun’s best looks?” one reader asked.

Kardashian faced a similar wave of outrage, shedding 250,000 followers and taking heat from prominent industry voices. Amanda Murray, an influential stylist, posted a screenshot of Kardashian’s post and remarked: “If you’re co-signing any of this in any way, including wardrobing them and normalizing them, you’re complicit in what happens next.”

It seems the backlash did its job. A week after the inauguration, Vogue published a scathing review of Melania’s official portrait, which described the first lady as resembling a “freelance magician” who looked “more like she was guest starring on an episode of The Apprentice than assuming the role of first lady of the United States.”

Yet while there was much criticism that the fashion press generally ignored Melania during Trump’s first term, those who work in the industry point out there was ample, albeit clinical, coverage of her style.

Rachel Tashjian, fashion critic at the Washington Post, notes that most fashion publications “covered what the Trump family wore extensively during their first term, as did fashion critics at the Post and the Times.”

“The change, to me, is that many designers and editors expressed an objection to a second Trump term,” she told me over email. “Now that we’re in a second Trump term, magazines and designers are having to figure out how to navigate these political waters because they made such a strong political statement last year.”

Coverage is one thing, but the holy grail of Trump supporters — a Trump on the cover of Vogue — is another matter.

Once the most prized real estate in all of fashion, Vogue’s cover remains, despite the magazine’s decreasing relevance in the age of Instagram, a monument of cultural success funded by Cartier ads and vigilantly guarded by editor in chief Anna Wintour.

Despite Vogue’s tradition of putting first ladies on its cover, Melania was never invited for a photoshoot and an interview by Condé Nast’s fashion bible. By comparison, Michelle Obama landed the cover three times during her husband’s terms in office. Jill Biden graced it twice.

“If Melania were a Democrat and said the right things she’d be on every single cover of every single magazine,” one media industry veteran told me.

“They covered Biden’s granddaughter’s wedding like it was the second coming, and he was a total disaster. It’s an egregious double standard.”

The Spectator reported on the obsession with getting Melania into the glossies on its website back in 2018, when pro-Trump actor James Woods posted incessantly on Twitter about the beauty and grace of the first lady and demanded to know why she wasn’t in Vogue.

“Since no American magazine will have put her on a cover, we’ll just have to celebrate her ourselves,” wrote Woods. He attached a photo of Mrs. Trump affixing ornaments to a Christmas tree.

No one has written about the Trump style quite like John Binder, a reporter covering immigration for Breitbart News, who also serves as the website’s fashion critic (yes, Breitbart has a fashion critic). “Americans are hungry for content like this; they want to see coverage of the most elegant people in the world,” Binder told me in a phone interview. “And Melania Trump, in particular, is not only one of the most elegant people in the world, she’s also like the most fashionable first lady we’ve ever had. She has long surpassed Jackie Kennedy. There’s no question.”

So it was baffling to Binder that, throughout Trump’s first term, he was often the only reporter covering the first family. “I just could never understand that the same people that had been praising the prior eight years of cardigans and khakis were criticizing this woman who was wearing the most elegant fashion that you could imagine,” he said.

In the pages of Breitbart, Binder regularly scolded the rest of the media for ignoring Melania.

“She’s the most fashionable United States First Lady the world has ever seen,” he wrote in 2018. “The most striking. The most poised in modern history. The quietest. The most deliberate. And the establishment press refuses to give her the time of day.”

After Trump was voted out of office in 2020, he posted one of Binder’s stories on Melania’s fashion, bearing the caption: “The elitist snobs in the fashion press have kept the most elegant First Lady in American history off the covers of their magazines for 4 consecutive years.”

Now, Binder sees the tide turning.

“Would it be so great if I continued to be the only person covering Melania’s clothes so intently? Yeah, that would be amazing. But truthfully, I hope that everyone else does start covering her. And I think the pendulum is swinging back to the middle.” Despite the right’s complaints, the snub isn’t a mystery. The fashion world is overwhelmingly liberal. And Trump will never be exactly mainstream. When his supporters stormed the Capitol in 2021 and he fled to Mar-a-Lago in disgrace, New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg wrote that it vindicated the refusal of institutions such as Vogue to normalize the Trumps. How would it have looked if, the month before, his wife had been treated to a Vogue cover with fawning copy to accompany it?

For that reason, among others, don’t expect the Trumps to land a Vogue cover anytime soon. I’m told the magazine has no plans to put Ivanka, Melania or Usha on the front of any of its editions, despite the brave new world where MAGA is the white-hot center of the culture.

For now, supporters of the first family will have to settle for lesser prizes. Hello! magazine, the fading British rag that now mostly collects dust on the shelves of airport convenience stores, published in early February what in any other time would be a major exclusive: a cover story and interview with First Lady Melania Trump.

The story featured glam shots of Melania posing under Trump Force One in a serious gray suit and disembarking from a black SUV in a pair of red-bottomed Louboutins. “FLOTUS is hands on, rising at 6 a.m. and often continuing with her work until 1 a.m.,” read a caption beneath a photo of a jeans-clad Melania examining an iPad on the President’s private jet.

Conservative media celebrated the victory: the Washington Examiner and the Daily Wire ran stories noting Melania’s “first magazine cover feature in sixteen years,” though they observed the cover was digital only.

“Melania was handled poorly by the New York Times and everybody in the first Trump presidency because she looked amazing the whole time and they never talked about it,” one magazine editor told me. “They would talk about the high heels, or the ‘I don’t really care, do u?’ jacket. But they never acknowledged that she looked incredible. That was always weird — because villains look great. Darth Vader dresses great. Hitler looked great!”

In a weird way, the editor said, it’s possible that the decision to ice out the Trumps, to ignore rather than celebrate Melania and the rest of the family, was yet another misstep that pushed Americans away from the traditional media and into the arms of the Trump movement.

Sensing this editor was reassessing the Trumps, I asked if they would put any of the clan on the cover of their mag.

After an extended pause came the disgusted reply: “No!”

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s March 2025 World edition.