I’m coming to love Melania more and more.

She obviously doesn’t care for the spotlight as much as Trump does (#introvert), but when she’s in it, she kills it. Especially on the style front.

There hasn’t been this much controversy about what Melania wore since the media was obsessed with the fact that she wore stilettos (which she always wears) on a flight to Houston.

(That was only last August, in case you lost track. The Houston floods seem like a few years ago, at least.)

Most of the time she lets the clothes do the talking on their own, but this is not the first time she’s used words on clothes to explicitly state her message. In Houston, she wore a FLOTUS cap. I guess sometimes you really just need to let the message hit home.

I wonder who her stylist is, and how much fun they have planning these outfits.

The people we usually talk about online who use clothes to tell a story are actors and actresses, out to promote their latest movie. Stylish people of all walks of life also imbue some of that storytelling into what they wear.

I certainly do, in my own outfits, but it’s a language that only people who know me well would understand.

Melania has figured out how to go from the personal, internal narrative of style (“this dress makes me feel confident so I’ll wear to make a presentation at work”) to an social, external narrative of style (“this jacket tells the media to f##k off, so I’ll wear it while boarding the plane so they’ll be forced to stare at it”).

Of course, the media then tries their best to make it about the children at the boarder and not themselves, but deflection and obfuscation is what the media does best these days.

Conservatives are so often concerned with doing things right that they don’t realize that there are effective ways to be wrong. Same goes with clothing. They’re more concerned with looking “well-dressed” than with stating an effective message with style.

Roger Stone doesn’t fall into that trap. Neither do Trump or Melania or Milo. Peter Duke understands it.

Part of this is because conservatives aren’t as into the dress-up-and-take-pictures scene. But I think part of it is also because conservatives think that aesthetics don’t matter. Only principles.

This is simply not true. Aesthetics–edifice, artifice, surface–are the way in which we encounter the world every single day. We tell our kids stories about the wolf in sheep’s clothing, so that they can be aware of the fact that appearances don’t always match motives.

And yet, Trump can’t be president because he doesn’t look presidential.

 

This is a topic I’d like to explore more. I’d love to know what you think–what would you want to read about?