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Key Points
- Melania Trump wore a distinctive navy hat with a white band at Donald Trump’s presidential inauguration.
- The hat became an internet sensation.
- It obscured Melania’s face for much of the event.
Donald Trump’s was a , but some were focused on what his wife was wearing — in particular, her hat.
As Trump entered the US Capitol Rotunda to be sworn into office, he moved to kiss the cheek of Melania but was blocked by a wide-brimmed hat that the first lady wore throughout the entirety of Inauguration Day.
The moment — and the hat — drew widespread attention on social media. Some complimented her look, saying Melania looked sophisticated and “stunning”. Others likened her to fictional superthief character Carmen Sandiego and the McDonald’s mascot Hamburglar.
Donald Trump air-kissed his wife Melania as her hat was in the way. Source: AAP
A video of Melania’s hat blocking her husband’s kiss was circulating widely on TikTok with the original poster saying the “hat finally makes sense”.
“She knew what she was doing”, one user commented.
Even Trump got in on the hat jokes during a speech following the inauguration ceremony, after his wife struggled to keep it on her head as the couple saw off former President Joe Biden and former First Lady Jill Biden, who departed Washington in a helicopter.
“With the hat that she’s wearing, she almost blew away,” Trump joked. “She was being elevated off the ground.”
For much of the day, the hat obscured Melania’s eyes for most viewers. The first lady, who rarely attended Trump’s campaign events last year, also wore a double-breasted navy mid-length jacket by Adam Lippes, another American designer.
Vanessa Friedman, the New York Times’ chief fashion critic, the hat along with her tightly-buttoned coat and high-neck blouse “gave her an air of mystery and inaccessibility”.
“That was unusual for an inauguration, when the first family is traditionally put on view as the new face of the nation,” Friedman wrote for the Times.
Melania, a former model, has made news before with her outfits.
In 2018, during her husband’s previous term, a visit she made to a Texas shelter housing migrant children separated from their parents was overshadowed by a jacket she wore with the words: “I really don’t care, do u?” scrawled in white brush strokes on the back.
Also that year, she was criticised for wearing a pith helmet because it was seen as a symbol of harsh colonial rule.
The bitter cold weather forced Trump’s inauguration indoors for the first time since Ronald Reagan’s in 1985. Source: EPA / Kevin Lamarque
Designer of Melania Trump’s hat speaks
The navy, boater-style hat with white trim sat atop Melania Trump’s head through a morning church service, her husband’s swearing-in ceremony, a luncheon with Republican politicians and tech billionaires and a parade inside the Capital One Arena.
That was entirely appropriate etiquette, according American designer Eric Javits, who told the Reuters news agency a hat should traditionally be worn all day.
Javits told US broadcaster NBC that he designed the hat with Melania’s stylist and said it took a couple of months to make.
But his first creation arrived damaged after being shipped from Miami to New York last month.
“I was texted a photograph right away and I could see that I had to do another one,” he told NBC. “So, I started on the next one right away.”
Reacting to jokes about the blocked kiss, Javits told NBC: “There will be plenty of kissing later.
“Whenever women wore hats in the old days that was an issue. But a lot of them wore hats with big brims so that no one would try, you know, that was their boundary.”
He told Reuters that, to him, it was an “understated, humble hat”.
“And, you know, when she put it on, and you saw it with the ensemble and all that, her presence transformed it and made it something very powerful,” he said.
With additional reporting by Reuters.
