
It must have been the call from hell. Mid-January, weeks till payday, and you’re just brushing the Wotsits dust from your jogger top when the phone goes: ‘Er, Ma’am, have you remembered it’s the inauguration on Monday…?’ Oh, FFS.
All those delicious weeks of WFH since November and suddenly you have a ‘work thing’ to attend. Not only that but one where billions of people across the globe will be looking, picking over and judging.
I’m glad to say Melania did what any sane woman would do in those circs: she chose naute couture.
The divorce-ready woman’s way to look searingly, ouchy-paper-cut chic while not really being there at all.
Tousled waves, ample cleavage and a purdy block colour for hubby? Absolutely naute.
Instead, we had buttoned-to-the-neck navy and cream by Adam Lippes and an Eric Javits hat so greedy it swallowed half her face.

Ah yes, the hat. Part of me thinks she just couldn’t face washing her hair. (We’ve all been there.)
Another theory is that it was chosen so those glacial eyes were not just unreadable this time, but invisible.
For 90% of the ceremony, you simply couldn’t see them. On the rare occasions her brim was raised, she seemed to be side-eyeing the lot of them, an angry stewardess spying a bag of cashews on a nut-free flight.
She rarely smiled. She hardly spoke to anyone, including her son Barron (sensible woman, that kid looks like he kicks small animals down corridors). She merely sat… and endured.
It was Grade-A ‘fuck this’ magnificence. It said ‘I may be married to a misogynist bully who’s just lost a fight with a box of easy-peelers, but he doesn’t control everything’. And oh how that silent, sullen defiance must have rankled The Don.
Coming at her like a horny uncle at a wedding, he had to settle for a clumsy air kiss when The Hat spoke for a nation of women by resisting his advances. High-five, Mel!

Of course, not everyone got the memo. Her stepchildren let the side down by trying embarrassingly hard for Dad’s Big Day.
Ivanka took the path of least Resistance in a cheese-eating surrender beret and belted ensemble by Dior.
It was elegant, naturally, but somehow buttock-clenchingly effortful. Ditto her copy of an Audrey Hepburn original by Givenchy for the inaugural ball. Cute!
A pregnant Tiffany Trump looked as insistently blow-dried as ever. And Lara Trump was in 4in Louboutin heels sans tights, despite a wind chill temperature of -10. All in all, it was a display of exhausting, performative womanhood for a man who judges us gals first and foremost on our looks.
Thank god then for Melania’s sexless anti-outfit. No woman ever dressed less to please a man, and more to please herself. Or rather, absent herself.

The First Lady once said: ‘I am not a “yes” person. No matter who you are married to, you still need to lead your life.’
Monday’s sartorial two-finger salute rather proved that. Yes, she loses points for marrying and procreating with the handsy stuffed apricot in the first place. And, I guess, for showing up at all. A huffy no-show like Michelle Obama’s would have been sheer bliss.
But she has won a small place in my ever shrinking heart for making a point.
I’m holding space for this inauguration, she telegraphed, but I’m not really here. In my head, I’m basking in the Palm Beach sun, just two mimosas away from being able to laugh at my husband’s jokes without retching.
Or perhaps she’s forging up and down the famous Mar-a-Lago pool she once posed in, demarking each stroke with a silent but insistent refrain: ‘He can’t live forever. He can’t live forever.’

Comments