HABLEMOS DE MELANIA TRUMP
TEXTO INGLÉS
We need to talk about Melania Trump’s Out of Africa wardrobe
The colonial pith helmet, the movie-Nazi fedora and whites … and the first lady wants us to take her seriously?
Hadley Freeman
Wed 10 Oct 2018 13.13 BST
Are we allowed to talk about Melania Trump’s outfits, or is it too belittling? I can’t keep up any more.
Daniel, by email
Ooh, it’s a tricky one, isn’t it, Daniel? On the one hand, seriously, is that woman actually wearing a PITH HELMET in Nairobi? And, on the other, are we being unfeminist talking about it? Where is Andrea Dworkin when you need her, or maybe just Emily Post? Let’s hear from Trump herself, as she gave a marvellously huffy TV interview about this very subject when she was in Egypt last week:
“I want to talk about my trip, not what I wear. That’s very important, what I do, what we’re doing with US aid, what I do with my initiatives, and I wish people would focus on what I do, not what I wear,” she harrumphed. And yet, her words might have had more impact if she hadn’t said them while dressed like Belloq the Nazi collaborator from the Indiana Jones film Raiders of the Lost Ark. I’m sorry, Melania, it’s just really hard to listen to a woman when she’s wearing the clothes of one of the most famous fictional Nazi collaborators of all time. Call me crazy!
Yes, aid is important. But what is Melania Trump doing with the US Agency for International Development (USAid)? Last time I checked, the Trump administration – which she is there to represent – tried to slash its funding by almost a third in the president’s first two budgets. Of course, anyone who asked her about that was promptly shut down, as Time magazine reported, because, it turned out in an amazing plot twist, Melania did not want to talk about US aid either. […]
For a while I suspected Trump was playing some weird game, telling people to stop talking about her clothes and then wearing a jacket that said “I really don’t care, do u?” while en route to an immigrant child detention centre. Was she gaslighting us with fashion? Then I wondered if perhaps the problem was that she was just so used to having to be mute around the spray-tanned Stay Puft Marshmallow Man she married that she could not help but try to talk through her clothes. But after jacketgate and what I am calling Belloqgate, I think it’s more simple: her stylist is a genius insurrectionist on the inside, working to make the Trumps look even more deranged than they are. There really is no other explanation, and, personally, I salute that stylist. I cannot wait for her SS-inspired wardrobe for her trip to Germany. Start polishing those black boots, Melania!