040: The Politics of Fashion

What we don't talk about when we talk about the Second Lady's style

For the past few days, fashion media has been acquainting itself with Usha Vance. The evening of the presidential inauguration, a popular stylist and social media commentator shared a now-deleted picture of the SLOTUS in a Gaurav Gupta dress, approving of Vance’s look and her alleged stylistic prowess. Within mere seconds, the comments that followed echoed similar sentiments. From a strictly aesthetic perspective, I was confused. From a political one, even more so.

Gaurav Gupta has been in the business for more than a minute. The designer’s red carpet-centric pieces are frequently worn by the moneyed and by celebrities both in Bollywood and Hollywood, joining the ranks of Elie Saab and the once-beloved Marchesa, the latter co-owned by a woman with marital ties to a convicted sex offender. Vance’s move to wear Gupta translates as nothing more than bait for those who delight in the myth-making of “South Asians supporting South Asians” content devoid of nuance and critical thinking. An imagined headline could read, “First South Asian Second Lady Wears Indian Designer At Inauguration For The First Time!” Exceptionalism at any cost! The choice is darkly comic given the violent and disastrous immigration policies going into effect.

Many in fashion media praised Vance’s girlish bubble-gum pink coat, the royal purple Gaurav Gupta dress, and her black velvet sweetheart neckline Oscar De La Renta dress. Some likened her approach to fashion and that of the Trump women to dare I say Princess Diana, a woman actually trapped in her and yet managed to extricate herself from, a woman who relied on fashion heavily to send a message. These sartorial selections by Vance and the Trumps softens their cunning, the comparisons they intend to draw and which we relent are tactical, projecting the image not of co-conspirators but of a new era of femininity, or rather a return to a very old one, of one man and one woman united under God, of abortion and childlessness as sin, contemptuous of sin. What Vance’s clothes actually read as was conservative whitewashing, the millennial’s Barbara Bush.

Already views on Vance are shaping up to mimic that which liberals conjured of Melania Trump during her first term: a hostage in captivity. Blink if you need help, in all its memeified glory. It’s ridiculous to think these independently powerful women were mindlessly ushered into marrying men vocal in their intentions to eviscerate fundamental rights. They are not victims of their circumstance. They are aware and complicit.

Barbara Kruger, Untitled (Questions), 1991

The praise that Usha Vance’s inaugural wardrobe garnered is, if anything, a demonstration of fashion media’s low expectations for and incomprehension of South Asians in the context of fashion. Elevating Usha Vance as a burgeoning fashion icon simply because the white imagination cannot compute South Asian women in designer clothing in overwhelmingly white and conservative spaces, while being able to duly critique the Trump women is hypocritical. Witnessing Usha Vance being pitted as Melania’s fashionable foil is embarrassing and troubling, the “lesser of two evils” narrative crafted in real time. When western fashion media commends Vance for her choice of clothing – several South Asian women have messaged me about this bewildered, which makes me wonder if we are being gaslit – it proposes the SLOTUS as a different, better alternative to the First Lady. Just as it is the case in American society, South Asian societies also struggle with a culture of toxic masculinity. South Asian women and girls like myself, my family and friends do not need the positive framing of an upper-caste conservative Indian American woman as we try to untangle ourselves from generations of imposed-upon feminine ideals as a consequence not only of misogyny, but of nearly two hundred and fifty years of colonialism, from the expansion of the East India Company into the rise and fall of the British Raj.

The fascination with Vance and the clothes she wears is simply sensationalism. Fashion media insists on largely keeping mum about politics, be it the obliteration of entire groups of people or mass deportation. Yet, what is funny about this position is that fashion is an immensely political craft, and if politics were indeed absented, the greatest minds and certainly the most revered materials would not exist. It’s unfortunate that often when South Asian women are spoken about in the context of fashion, they are only of consequence if they are representatives of regressive politics, a decaying empire, or possess obscene wealth, as if brilliant South Asian women, in terms of their fashion and politics, are hard to come by. And though the insistence remains that politics is removed from fashion, a great deal of resources are poured into tracking what the women of the catastrophe that is American politics wear: Kamala in Kamali’s Chloe, or SLOTUS in ODLR.

As a South Asian woman with political ideologies that Usha Vance would categorize as being “of leftist persuasion”, undue praise of the Second Lady’s inaugural outfits struck a deep nerve. The clothes were just fine and not at all visually stimulating; one could have analyzed instead what story the clothes were trying to tell, and what it says of designers and brands that worked in collaboration. The callous celebration of a woman who will stand by her man as he doles out policies that will devastate the lives of so many South Asians (not the moneyed, of course) shows how little people not directly impacted care or care to know about those unlike them. Each time I was unwillingly blasted with yet another one of Vance’s costumes, all I could think of was how much they resembled the stylings of blood money Desi aunties I’d grown up seeing and hearing about, their wealth and status accumulation reliant on the suffering and deprivation of others, at the American Club, cosplaying their white fantasies in the most unimaginative and expensive ways.