From a fashion point of view, 2018 peaked – or rather, troughed – one Thursday in June, when the US first lady wore a green army jacket emblazoned with the slogan “I really don’t care. Do U?” to visit a shelter for unaccompanied children. Many of the children were in the Texas facility after being separated from their parents, an immigration policy for which President Trump was being denounced as heartless.
The jacket was 2018 in a nutshell. A story almost laugh-out-loud in its absurdity, and yet deadly serious. (The strapline for this year could surely be: “Yes, that really happened.”) An outrageous White House play that became a lightning rod for the spotlight. A Trump move that does not even pretend to appeal to voters’ highest instincts, but instead encourages their darkest, meanest side with an enabling wink.
The television cameras that documented Melania Trump walking up the steps of her plane at an airfield in Maryland that morning were afforded, as she had known they would be, a lingering back view of her outfit. Some of the 6in-high letters were obscured by the hood, but within minutes of the image landing on social media, the jacket (£39.99 from Zara in 2016) and its slogan had been identified.
There was anger and disbelief, there were Marie Antoinette analogies, and then the gallows humour that reigns on social media at these moments. (My favourite tweet went: “Melania wore a mean jacket to visit child prisoners but at least she’s not a black first lady who dared wear a sleeveless dress.”) Melania’s go-to stylist, Hervé Pierre, told reporters he had never seen the jacket before – eminently believable, since he works exclusively with high-end fashion. The first lady’s communications director, Stephanie Grisham, said: “It’s a jacket. There was no hidden message.”
Grisham was right, of course. There was no hidden message. Quite the opposite. The message was literally spelled out in large letters. The vocabulary was brash, the rhythm jarring, there was random capitalisation and abbreviation. Exactly like one of @realDonaldTrump’s tweets. This was the moment when the world realised that Melania was not secretly signalling to be saved, but really was Donald’s partner and ally. The Save Melania movement had been a joke, but one that expressed a truth, which was that of a world not taking Trump quite seriously. It expressed a buried hope that maybe the Trump White House was somehow a hoax. The jacket was one of the moments when 2018 pointed out to us: yes, this really is happening.
The story got more bizarre. Within days, enterprising souls had dug the now-famous Zara jacket from their wardrobes; one fetched 20 times its original price on eBay. Then the denim brand R13 accused Zara of copying a similar parka of its own, with “God save America” daubed in white. Zara, which has never commented on the Melania affair, responded to the plagiarism accusations by stating that its jacket was on sale in September 2016, when R13 told the Cut website that it showed its own jacket, and therefore could not have been a copy. To confuse matters further, both items bear a similarity to the “God save the Queen” parka worn by Kate Moss on the cover of iD magazine in June 2002.
In 2015, the internet went into meltdown on the night of the Met Gala, when Rihanna wore a dress that, from some angles, looked a bit like an omelette. That was just three years ago, but it was a lost age of innocence. 2018 calls for a lot more eggs-plaining.
