Fashion Post: Studying Melania

(Image credits: Non-book images are public-domain photos donated to Bing by news sites.)

For the past month I've been paid to write things that were not blog posts. Today I've been paid to write a blog post, and the prompt was "Why don't bloggers say more about Melania Trump?"



Well, duh. I traced this question back to the notoriously intrepid blogger Michelle Malkin, who just does not understand ordinary women. "Americans like Melania," MM posted at National Review Online. "She's beautiful, smart, multilingual, a devoted mother..."

Americans who like Melania like her because she's beautiful. Americans who dislike her probably dislike her for the same reason. Michelle Malkin, not being a natural-born White American, may not realize this--there are White American supermodels and movie stars who look at these pictures and feel inadequate.

There is also the "younger second wife" thing, only in the Trump menage it'd be a "younger third wife" thing, which is even worse...This web site refuses to go there. The time for wisecracks about the Trump menage was before young Barron was old enough to read them. All I'll say is that although I've always called First Ladies "Mrs." whatever, "Mrs. Trump" still sounds like Ivana's title to me; his other two wives are merely Marla and Melania.


But seriously, Michelle Malkin, how can you not notice? Peggy Noonan's Case Against Hillary Clinton was basically that HRC wouldn't have been your best friend at school, and Noonan got one part right: a lot of American baby-boomers project onto the baby-boomer-age Presidents and First Ladies the emotions they think they would have felt about these people if they'd been in school together. That's what they have in mind when they call the First Couples by their first names. Considered as college dorm mates...if they'd been cast in a movie about girl friends, Hillary would have been the ideal study buddy; Michelle would have been the gorgeous cheerleader you wanted to be seen with; Laura would have been the one you really admired and wanted for a best friend. Melania might just possibly, in a Lifetime Channel girl-power drama, be the misunderstood one who threatens to drop out of school, but more likely she'd be cast as an evil foreign spy, a homewrecker, or at best as The Worst Friend Anyone Could Imagine.



Dagny Taggart, maybe?



Or Zenia--wouldn't she make a great Zenia?

It is possible that, if women who do find it possible to forgive Melania for being pretty in such a sultry, exotic, unusual way started raving about "the Melania Look," other women would seriously hate her.

It is probable that, if we started gushing about "the Melania Look," we, ourselves, would feel as if we were teenagers again, compounding our natural awkwardness by trying to copy "the Diana Look" and not knowing why those styles were never going to look good on us. Even if we know by now that most of us would not look good in what looks so good on Melania, we'd worry about sounding like the sort of little girls who did not know that, and did not have lives and jobs to write about, either.

It is certain that, by 1990, a lot of us had had time to notice how much younger and slimmer we looked in styles that suited grandmotherly Barbara Bush than in styles that suited young, thin, beautiful Diana Spencer, and we said, "We will not look back. We will not buy 'fashions.' We will buy clothes, that suit us, and wear them whether they're in fashion or not."

Right. This web site salutes women's right to wear the styles that suit us.

By and large those are unlikely to be the ones that suit Melania Trump, because although she looks more like a normal human being than gawky Diana Spencer did, she's not only extra-tall and indecently well preserved; she's a "Spring."



Remember, in the "Color Me Beautiful" system, "color seasons" have little to do with the colors traditionally associated with a season of the year. Each of the four "color seasons" includes a full range of different ethnic types, but the majority of people are Winters, and you don't see a Spring every day. Springs are those rare people who look good in the sludgy, drab colors that make the rest of us look grungy and those bright, hot colors that make the rest of us look washed-out. Springs are people who do not look jaundiced in mustard yellow.



Springs are not normal. Some Springs are beautiful, but somehow most of us know there's no way we can copy their look.

Springs do (this may console some people) look sort of weird in colors that would be much more flattering to most of us than the colors only a Spring can wear.



Maybe now you believe she's forty-eight?

So the first thing we learn from studying photos of Melania Trump is never to buy anything in those colors, or not as a garment, anyway.



A pink pantsuit, with creases and all, as worn in 1978, may be due for a revival--but the rest of us should avoid that pink.



Those dresses with tiers of ruffles, also circa 1978, were fun, and red may be a good party color--but the rest of us should look for soft, rosy reds or deep, raspberry reds, never that tomato-ey red.



And most of us can wear almost any shade of blue--but not this blue.

That dress also brings up the question of skirt lengths. Skirts about knee length, as worn by Diana Spencer, visually "cut you off at the knee" and make you look shorter. That's an effect Di needed, and Melania often uses. Women under 5'10" have less difficulty finding skirts that cover the curves of the leg, and look better when we wear them.

Diana Spencer was scraggy. Melania is curvey, even Barbie-like. Bottom-heavy women should probably look to Jennifer Lopez and/or Hillary Clinton for fashion inspiration, but personally, as a top-heavy woman, I've seen Melania showing off some things I'd like to wear.



Those of us who aren't extra-tall need to make sure that kind of fitted jacket is fitted just right, but you have to admit it's a great look.



Tight turtlenecks that really hug the neck make a lot of people look fat--or choked, or both. Looser "cowl" necklines, on the other hand...



Wide belts...dang, this woman's wardrobe is a nostalgia trip. I wonder whether she remembers some of these looks from the last time they were in fashion? She wouldn't have been old enough to wear them, but she undoubtedly saw grown-ups wearing them.



Top-heavy women have to be skinny to get away with a tight skirt, but I'm sure both Dagny Taggart and Zenia had an arsenal of them...

Well...if you're a top-heavy woman, these pictures have undoubtedly given you some ideas. And if you're only slightly older than Melania, you may even still have the clothes in the attic.

Adapting any components of the Melania Look we may want to incorporate into our wardrobes is a deeply personal matter, having to do not only with our personal shape but also with how much attention we want to call to it on any given day. Melania Trump can afford to wear some of these outfits because she rode to and from these events surrounded by more armed officers than your town probably has on duty at one time. I'll confess having worn a skin-tight skirt on the street, but not when I was alone, and never with hooker-heel shoes. (Free fun fact: I have never worn hooker-heel shoes on the street.)

However, there are two aspects of the Melania Look I completely like:

1. That brown hair. How many White American women just assume that they'll look more interesting if they dye their brown hair black, or brassy yellow, or red, or maybe chartreuse, but not the brown color to which true Caucasian hair usually fades even if it started out being red or blond. And how wrong they are. It goes with being a Spring, but Melania positively flaunts her brown hair even now that it's starting to fade to gray. Totally cool.

2. That face. Well, so it's a very Slavic, North Asian face--the type of face chosen for evil spies during the Cold War, which is probably why I keep thinking of fictional characters like Dagny and Zenia. That's not what people admire about Melania's face.



She's forty-eight. She could pass for twenty-four. Envious women may now repeat in chorus: "Hah. Wait'll she hits fifty. That'll change fast." And I say to them: You wish.

There've always been people--some famous examples including Jack LaLanne, Ronald Reagan, Katherine Hepburn, Sophia Loren--who looked positively young all the way through middle age. Well...most of the time, they did. Now that I'm over fifty I can imagine that there were times when they looked "older" than they were, but those times were exceptions they were able to conceal from public view. They really did have the faces they, in some sense, "deserved." They didn't start to look "older" until they were positively "old."

I've blogged about being one of them (so far) because I see this happening to quite a few baby-boomers, and because it's what we were not told to expect. People who have them most of the time want to believe that baggy eyelids and saggy jawlines are part of "the aging process." They're not. They're visible on children who've been sick; they're conspicuously not part of "the aging process" as seen on healthy ninety-year-olds, whose hair may be white and whose skin may be positively cross-hatched with wrinkles, but whose wrinkling can still be described as "smile lines" rather than sags and bags.

Sagging and bagging definitely make anyone look older and fatter than the person did before the infection, the late night, the dehydration, the heavy bleeding, or the hangover...or than the person will after those causes of false aging have been addressed.

I'm fifty-plus, right? I'm not ashamed of it; this is what fifty looks like. I've been the same height and worn the same dress size since high school. I now have enough white hair to show up in a good light and prove the black hair is real. When I'm healthy, people in their twenties still think I might be one of them. When I've been out in the heat for a few hours or had a celiac reaction, people my age mistake me for some 75-year-old or even 85-year-old relative. And this is not unusual--the 85-year-old relative with mostly black hair may have to be biracial, but lots of people dye their hair. Graying is genetic, but this business of looking 25 today and 75 tomorrow seems to be happening to a lot of people in their fifties.

NASCAR fans had a chance to observe how this false aging actually works for a few years in the 1990s, when Richard Petty was still the King of NASCAR and his son Kyle was trying to race too. Richard Petty adopted a trademark look that covered up all the sites of real aging--big hat to cover gray or thinning hair, big glasses and mustache to cover the thinnest skin areas on the face--and so managed to look about half the age everyone knew he was. Still did, the last time I looked. Kyle Petty preferred beer and soda pop to water, stayed out late, partied like the rich kid he was, and so frequently looked "older" than his father. He also tended to wash out during long hot races.

People can't really fake the look of good health--dyed hair can aggravate the unhealthy look, makeup conceals only so much, and more drastic effects last only so long--but many people are succeeding in maintaining it. They're not celebrities so I won't mention their names, but I do regularly see women with "young," pretty faces who still look great in red, with long, snow-white hair, like Galadriel.

If Melania manages to avoid major illness and stay hydrated, she may look lovelier than ever, in her weird Spring way, as a "blonde," when she's older than Donald Trump is now.

I say she should go for it, and long may her brown-or-"blonde" hair wave.



That may well be as bad as she'll ever get. Go, girl!