What was all the fuss about the
“jacket” Melania Trump wore on a humanitarian mission last week? If you're like me, your immediate reaction to all the tweets and e-mails was, "Who cares?"--but you should care. This is why.
I didn't care. You can take the model off the runway but you can’t take the runway out of a
real supermodel. With her trademark ability to look fabulous in colors that
make normal human beings look either dirty or jaundiced or both, Melania will
probably look as if she were struttin’ and stylin’ the latest color-you-can’t-wear
in her coffin, long after her baby-boomer critics are gone. Left-wingers, spare
your envy, I thought. Generation X are grown-ups now. Deal with it.
I saw the official
photo of her leaving the plane in something cream-colored. Shirt, jacket,
dress, who cared? We all know designers fight for the right to get the First
Lady to wear their designs. If the cream-colored item was her “Don’t Care
Jacket,” straight from the studio of whoever fancies himself or herself the
next Christian Dior, I saw nothing newsworthy there.
But no, somebody said,
the message “I don’t care” had actually been painted on the jacket. A “rain
jacket” she’d worn while changing planes in the rain.
Say whaaat? Number one,
they obviously hadn’t seen the same plain white top-piece I’d seen. Number two,
although everybody knows the message of rain gear painted with “I don’t care”
or “Let it snow” or “This is my ducky day” is that you don’t mind the weather
in your warm dry gear, since when do Washingtonians wear rain gear other than
the classic trench coat?
Little kids might get the “I’ll be your sunshine today” treatment,
but not for long. I’ve seen (and bought for The Nephews) classic trench coats in children's size three.
Nobody makes Washingtonians do
this. Newcomers to the city bring other rain gear, but soon learn: There is no
garment more appropriate to Washington’s climate than the classic London Fog.
Some frown on the trench coat’s surplus-store look, but Melania, never averse
to documenting that she looks healthy in olive or khaki, has been known to wear
shirts and jackets inspired by actual soldiers’ uniforms.
So what kind of “rain jacket”
had Melania chosen, and who had begged or bribed her to wear it? This I had to see, so I
clicked over to the Daily Kos, which is a left-wing group blog similar to The
Blaze, only shriller. (I subscribe to both blogs’ e-mail updates but seldom
click through because both sites are cluttered and behave badly.)
Yes, there was the
Queen of the Runways, modelling an olive-drab hooded rain jacket. (The hood was
a nice effect, not unlike the button-on hoods sold with some of the better classic trench coats.) On the back someone did indeed appear to have painted “I don’t
care and neither do U.” A prank by one of the fun-loving Trump children,
perhaps? No, said Kos readers, it was a design currently for sale in an online
store (link), from Zara.
ZARA???!!!
Zara that’s reportedly still refusing to pay laborers for work they did in 2016?
(Just to be clear, these laborers in Turkey are petitioning for back wages they earned but weren't paid during a corporate takeover. Reportedly most are still working now, but have yet to collect what they earned then.)
So this is not the
normal little-kid “I don’t care how hard it rains” motif.
This is not just the
often reported, sometimes quite amusing, “foreigner plays with unfamiliar
writing system as art motif.”
Anyone who’s wearing anything
from Zara is telling the world “I support companies that fail to pay workers.”
That’s "The Rrrest of the Story" behind the Daily Kos report (no link to a messy page) that Zara has been cranking out designs with all kinds of messages calculated to raise a fuss in the English-speaking world, issuing bogus apologies for one garment after another emblazoned with bait for one hypersensitive demographic after another. I didn't see the specific garment that upset Holocaust survivors (now that's a group with a valid reason for being hypersensitive) but I did see a "Gluten Free" design that raised screams of "Don't you even caaare about celiacs?"
Don't you even caaare about companies that just abscond with the wages their workers have earned, online shoppers of America? And if you don't, why should those workers give a flyin' flip whether their "edgy new urban styles" offend you? My guess is that they're printing up the most obnoxious slogans they can think of, short of obvious robot-censor-triggers like "I Hate U."
It's called sabotage. It's the next step after sewing into clothes little notes that read "I made this garment but I didn't get paid for it."
I care, Gentle Readers. So should you. And so should Melania Trump.
She probably didn't see the original story; the First Lady of the United States does not actually have a lot of time to hang out online, and some criticize her even having a Twitter account. Well, here's the story, being tweeted specifically to her--or her social media consultant, rather. It would be great publicity for Melania Trump to investigate the story behind her famous rain jacket.
In theory Americans can't do much to help laborers in Turkey collect money owed to them by a company in Spain. In practice, being as famous, as rich, and as pretty as Melania can fairly be considered a super-power; Melania Trump just might be able to resolve this situation.
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Amazon book link? Why not? For those whose minds didn't replay the distinctive sound of "The Rrrest of the Story," a selection of the fun facts Paul Harvey Aurandt used to narrate on radio under that title:
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