Ivanka and Melania Trump’s four year pageant has come to an end, and part of me will miss it

Way back, before she married her property tycoon and long before she became First Lady, Melania Knauss – as she was then known – had a vision for her White House aesthetic:

“I would be very traditional. Like Betty Ford or Jackie Kennedy,” she told the New York Times in 1999.

And while her four years as FLOTUS have been marred with as many fashion fails as her husband’s Twitter feed has scandals, one thing Melania – and her stepdaughter Ivanka – have delivered fairly unwaveringly on is their idealised, heel-tottering, blinged and blow-dried vision of 1960s femininity. Jackie O, but with more lip gloss and Louboutins.

I am not for a minute suggesting you have to be into it, but perhaps we should salute their commitment to the aesthetic; a commitment taken to such extremes in Melania’s case that her wardrobe at times had more than a whiff of the costume cupboard about it.

An ex-model and daughter of a fashion designer, Melania understood the power of optics, and thus kicked off project Jackie O 2.0 from day one, with the powder blue cashmere Ralph Lauren dress and matching long suede powder blue gloves she wore to her husband’s inauguration back in 2017. The look, which drew easy comparisons with the Cassini beige coat dress and long white gloves Jackie wore when John F Kennedy was inaugurated in 1961, was certainly elegant, and in its stark divergence from the sexier 90s-supermodel garb that had largely dominated her wardrobe prior, appeared to declare her commitment to the new role.

Since that day, Melania has provided the world with a welcome dose of unapologetically OTT, fairytale fashion, the highlights of which have been the sequinned Chanel gown she wore to welcome Emmanuel Macron and his wife Brigitte Macron to the White House in 2018 (a sparkling example of sartorial diplomacy), and the yellow Grecian gown by French couturier J Mendel that she wore to a state dinner at Blenheim Palace in the same year, which was truly the stuff of Disney movies – albeit with unavoidable connotations, when stood side by side with her husband, of Belle and the Beast.

Both Melania and her stepdaughter Ivanka - despite rumours of being at-war behind closed doors - are masters of the inscrutably glamorous, high-heeled and high-gloss aesthetic that’s become synonymous with team Trump – well, the female faction at least. Whether its towering pastel suede court shoes that only work if you have a chauffeur, or pearlescent white dresses only super moneyed mummies with an army of staff would dare wear, it’s a dressing formula that’s sexy Stepford wife in its superhuman shininess.

And what’s so wrong with being glamorous, I hear you cry? They are wife and daughter of one of America’s richest men after all. Well, it’s not the blow dry bills and silly heels in general that’s problematic, it’s their unwillingness to tweak their body-con, cape-heavy designer wardrobes to befit their surroundings. And the price tags, oh lord the price tags.

There was the Dolce & Gabbana floral coat Melania chose for the 2017 G7 summit in Sicily which at $51,500, cost more than an average US household’s annual income, and then the giant emerald cut diamond she wore in her first official White House portrait which, at 13, 24 or 25 carats depending which gem analyst you believe, was identified as costing approximately 3 million dollars, enough to cover welfare programs, like Meals on Wheels, the President planned to cut in his budget.

These are women that wear £1000 pristine white dresses to visit cocoa farms, $2,950 neon fuchsia Delpozo dresses to give speeches on ending child hunger at the U.N. and Manolos to board flights to hurricane disaster zones. Fabulous? Maybe. But fabulously inappropriate? You betcha.

At other times the performance ventured into a pageantry that was at best confusing, and at worst offensive. The inexplicable cream suit, white shirt, skinny black tie and belt with matching fedora hat that Melania wore to meet with the Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah el-Sisi and his wife, First Lady Entissar Mohameed Amer on her Africa tour in 2018 was utterly perplexing. Was she trying to conjure Meryl Streep in Out of Africa? Gangster-era Chicago? Michael Jackson’s Smooth Criminal? While the colonial pith helmet – a hat with a violent, racist history of oppression - that she chose to wear for a safari in Kenya was nothing short of unpleasant.

“I wish people would focus on what I do, not what I wear,” she lamented, standing in front of the pyramids in her aforementioned gangster get-up on the last day of her Africa tour. A plea which, given the ill-defined purpose of her tour, fell on ears as deaf as her sartorial tone.

And honestly, did she really mean it? Could she really tell people to stop talking about her clothes and then wear a jacket that said “I really don’t care, do u?” while en route to an immigrant child detention centre?

"I’m not always right. I make mistakes, and same for her. There’s no 'How to Be the Perfect First Lady' book. You learn on the spot," Hervé Pierre, her stylist and thus the man responsible for much of her fashion theatrics told The Cut. “When you work with a woman, it’s not about the clothes. It’s about the way a person is living: the way she eats, the way she organizes her flowers...” Uhuh.

Ivanka meanwhile has rarely put a Manolo-clad foot wrong, a feat presumably thanks to Cat Williams, the celebrity stylist whose help she enlisted once Donald got to the White House and who ensured Trump’s eldest spent the last four years majoring in a gorgeous array of Gabriela Hearst jumpsuits, Emilia Wickstead dresses and Racil suits, with $12,000 Rodarte gowns and the $3,600 baby pink Valentino dress she wore to the G20 Summit a reminder of her 0.01% status.

The message from both the FLOTUS and DOTUS has always been a subtle one of distancing. In making no effort to be relatable, they retain a strange other-worldlyness that couldn’t feel more at odds with Michelle Obama or indeed Dr Jill Biden, both of whom are women who dress with humility and an awareness of public perception.

And yet, as we have watched, track-panted, the madness of the last year unfurl from our sofas, have we not taken some pleasure in Melania’s excellent Gucci voting day dress? Or her gorgeous orange suede Prada coat and Louboutin heels for Halloween? Or Ivanka’s curiously all-white 2020 wardrobe? Could we maybe even possibly be destined to miss the mad spectacle?

With the Trumps planning to skip Biden’s inauguration ceremony tomorrow, the pair have been denied their final opportunity for princessy peacocking on a global scale. Team Trump’s time in the White House has finally come to an end, and Melania and Ivanka can hang up their suede gloves, slip out of their six-inch Louboutin’s and explore the delights of a pair of Levi’s.

Something tells me they’ll be doing no such thing.