Let’s Properly Photograph Melania Trump

    One of the most tragic aspects of the media’s decade-long meltdown over Donald Trump is the lost opportunity that is Melania Trump. Here we have a stunning professional model in the White House, beauty right in your face, and the media and fashion industry were too busy throwing tantrums to celebrate the First Lady and create art that reflects her style — and makes Americans proud.

    Since no one else is doing it, I’d like to professionally photograph the First Lady. Several years ago I had a side hustle as a photographer, a gig that started because the regular photog didn’t show up to a party and resulted in me shooting models who went on to things like AmericanIdol (top ten contestant) and movies and commercials. I’m not Andy Warhol, but it still bothers me that Melania is ignored in favor of questionable aesthetic choices by the industry. Art is important to a culture, and it should irritate us that we had — and have — a gorgeous professional model helping to represent the Leader of the Free World, and we’re just letting it go to waste.

    Probably the nastiest thing written about the First Lady in this context was by fashion writer Robin Givhan last February in a review of the movie Melania:

Melania is dedicated to the primacy of image-making within the Trump universe. It celebrates the First Lady’s commitment to heels, a bouncy blowout, and a smoky eye. The film teaches us that her interest in style is not an aside or a deflection; it is the central point. And it is not in service to America’s glory, to Seventh Avenue, or to diplomacy. It is an exercise in narcissism.

Fashion without narrative, context, or emotion is just clothes. And Mrs. Trump manages to flatline an entire industry. When she enters a room, she does not brighten it; she dims it. She is a fashion asphyxiant.

    Oh please. Melania represents what Aldous Huxley called “the monster of the obvious” – something so obviously grand or great or lovely that it cannot be denied. Beethoven is a genius. Tom Brady is great at football. Annie Leibovitz is a gifted photographer. And Melania Trump is beautiful. The great theologian Dietrich von Hildbrand once said that those unfortunates who were not receptive to beauty might cynically pass off their lack of perception to some external force – capitalism, the culture, their school, whatever – but the problem is always with them. It is they who are deficient. Ignoring Melania is like having Wynton Marsalis as the president and demanding he never play music. It’s a loss for our entire culture.

    My all-time favorite Melania outrage was in 2017 when the First Lady was photographed wearing high-heeled shoes while leaving the White House for flood-ravaged Texas. Liberals went crazy – even if the story was not true – denouncing the First Lady as an out-of-touch Marie Antoinette in Manolo Blahniks.
    Melania’s runway walk to Air Force One hit the perfect liberal trifecta. She’s an immigrant who doesn’t get that she’s supposed to be a Democrat, a gorgeous model who wears things that accentuate her sexiness, and is married to one of the richest men in the world, a Republican.

    Of course, to liberals there is the terrible example Melania is setting of enforcing “binary” gender roles. According to British psychologist Paul Morris, quoted in Newsweek,  high heels offer “supernormal stimuli ” — stimuli that work better than the original biological trait in provoking an instinctive response. “In terms of the human example, we tend to find the defining characteristics of the opposite sex attractive,” Morris wrote in his paper. “High heels function in a similar way. Males respond to the characteristic way a woman walks, i.e., the movement of the female pelvis: High heels just exaggerate the femaleness of the walk. So to deconstruct why Trump women wear high heels: They are just buying into traditional binary views of male and female.”

     The stilettos represent the ability to maintain grace and fortitude under terrible pressure, both strong American traits. Journalist Nina Burleigh once noted the fact that Melania and Ivanka Trump both wear high heels. Burleigh: “The vertiginous spike-heel shoe is not currently in fashion, but for Ivana, Ivanka, Melania and the Trump daughters-in-law, Carrie Bradshaw’s shoe of choice never went out of style. In fact, the female consorts of the Leader of the Free World do not set foot in public without first molding their arches into the supernatural curve that Mattel toy designers once devised for Barbie’s plastic feet.”

     For good measure, Burleigh quotes American anthropologist and author Helen Fisher: “High heels thrust out the buttocks and arch the back into a natural mammalian courting—actually, copulatory—pose called ‘lordosis.’ Rats do it, sheep do it…lions do it, dogs do it. It is a naturally sexy posture that men immediately see as sexual readiness. [Heels] are a ‘come-hither’ signal.” They can also probably keep her well above water level. 

   Burleigh concluded by citing Melania’s friend and former Vogue editor Andre Leon Talley. “It creates a tall, statuesque, almost ideal elegance,” Talley says, but, wrote Burleigh, “also comes with an element of risk—which, mastered, further differentiates them from the average woman.” To Talley, the shoe “defies gravity. It is a risk-taking shoe. If you stumble, you will break your ankle. But these girls have mastered the art absolutely through rigorous discipline of daily exercise and weight loss, and when you set your foot into the toe box you have the mental knowledge that you can’t make those mistakes and fall.” 

    Not a bad symbol for the grit and determination of America.

    I get it — the culture war rages, and there are more important things in life than the cover of Vogue. Yet culture matters. We may not have another First Lady as resplendent as Melania Trump. Someone who knows what they’re doing should properly photograph her. I’m game.

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