Sophie Theallet, a French fashion designer who made dresses for Michelle Obama, penned an open letter to her fellow fashionistas imploring them not to design clothes for the Trumps.
It appears neither the Trumps themselves nor anyone on their transition team has asked Ms. Theallet to design anything for them, so why is she declining the honor before it’s been offered?
As an independent fashion brand, we consider our voice an expression of our artistic and philosophical ideas,” the letter began. “The Sophie Theallet brand stands against all discrimination and prejudice.”
Theallet wrote that although she know it’s “not wise to get involved in politics,” her family-owned company “is not just about money.”
“We value our artistic freedom and always humbly seek to contribute to a more humane, conscious and ethical way to create in this world,” she wrote.
The New York-based fashion designer added that as an immigrant to the U.S., “who celebrates and strives for diversity, individual freedom, and respect, for all lifestyles, I will not participate in dressing or associating in any way with the next First Lady.”
“The rhetoric of racism, sexism and xenophobia unleashed by her husband’s presidential campaign are incompatible with the shared values we live by. I encourage my fellow designers to do the same,” she said.
Theallet concluded her note by writing, “Integrity is our only true currency.”
The designer, who launched her label in 2007, won the prestigious CFDA/Vogue Fashion Fund Award in 2009. Theallet has dressed many celebrities, including Shailene Woodley, Neve Campbell and Gabrielle Union.
Still, not all designers are shunning the incoming first lady. Carolina Herrera told the Business of Fashion earlier this month that she predicts designers will soon be flocking to Melania Trump to dress her.
“I think that in two or three months they’ll reach out, because it’s fashion,” Herrera told the website. “You’ll see everyone dressing Melania. She’s representing the United States.”
It takes a special kind of arrogance to turn down a job that was never offered to you.
Leftists live in a world that roundly affirms everything they believe, every day. Inside that bubble is another, smaller bubble made up of artists and their celebrity hangers-on who, if anything, are more insular, more oblivious to the real world that spins around them.
They can’t fathom the irony of promising to leave America if a politician is elected and then pretending they said no such thing. They don’t believe anything is wrong with putting down the very people who pay their salaries and worship them as special by referring to ordinary Americans as racists, homophobes, and Islamophobes because they disagree with them politically.
Their self-image is heroic, standing on the battlements waving the bloody shirt. The self-abnegation of refusing the honor of designing dresses for the first lady is part of the heroic image they have of themselves. The real purpose, of course, is to draw attention to themselves while proving to their friends how morally superior they are to the hoi polloi and other lowly life forms they are forced to share the planet with.
Donald and Melania Trump will have no problem finding an excellent designer to fashion good looking clothes. (Melania would look ravishing in a burlap sack.) This makes Theallet’s pathetic, self-aggrandizing letter no more than a nauseating moralistic display that no one outside of her tiny circle of like-minded leftists cares about.
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