Back in 2017, it was something of a shock for the New York-based industry to see Ralph Lauren dress Trump. The designer had donated $13 million to the Smithsonian Museum of National History to restore the star-spangled banner at the behest of former President Bill Clinton and First Lady Hillary Clinton. Online, the hashtag #BoycottRalphLauren started trending on Twitter (now X). “The Presidential Inauguration is a time for the United States to look our best to the world,” the label said at the time. “It was important to us to uphold and celebrate the tradition of creating iconic American style for this moment.” The call for a boycott came and went, as most social media campaigns do.

Shifting tides

Will the same resistance hold? It is undeniable that there has been a swing towards conservatism in America, particularly seen in youth culture and Big Tech. Take the ‘trad wife’ aesthetic, Meta’s rolling back of professional fact-checking, or the mere fact that President Trump won the popular vote this election after losing it in 2016.

What this means for fashion is that to openly oppose conservative values could mean alienating more customers. Can it afford to? As we reported in late 2024, the global personal luxury market lost some 50 million consumers last year, and the current luxury slowdown has put a strain on the industry. In turn, fashion executives have traditionally been, at the least, cordial and diplomatic with both sides of the aisle.

Back in 2019, then-President Trump joined LVMH CEO Bernard Arnault at the inauguration of a Louis Vuitton factory in Texas. In 2022, Arnault attended a Biden-hosted state dinner at the White House, and both he and Kering’s François-Henri Pinault appeared at Emmanuel Macron’s reception for former President Joe Biden in June of last year. Arnault’s son, the former Tiffany exec and incoming deputy CEO of LVMH’s wine and spirits division, Alexandre Arnault was spotted at the Trump-Vance rally at Madison Square Garden last year. With this administration potentially raising tariffs for the very division Arnault Jr will help oversee (effective February 2025), the possibility that he is establishing a relationship with President Trump is not surprising.

Arnault and his daughter, Christian Dior CEO Delphine Arnault, were both at Monday’s inauguration. Tech giants, including Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg, also in attendance, have openly embraced the Trump administration (significantly, they’ve each donated $1 million to the event), while Kim Kardashian has been public about her affection for Ivanka Trump. Is it possible that the fashion industry could follow suit this time around and become more willing to align itself with the Trump administration?

A dose of pragmatism

For brands like Lippes’s, whose aesthetic tends to the tony and the uptown, it seems like a no-brainer to dress Melania. A representative for Oscar de la Renta — which dressed Second Lady Usha Vance this past weekend for the Vice President’s dinner and Ivanka for a separate event — recently told CNN that the brand is “always honoured when asked to dress the First Lady of the United States”, and that its mission is to “make her look and feel her best regardless of politics”. (Lippes, coincidentally, came up at Oscar de la Renta, where he worked closely with the late designer.)