Fashion enters the second Trump era

Bend your knee and kiss the ring

Photo via Unsplash / Jingming Pan

We’re back. Taking a few months off from writing here has been very good for me, I feel motivated and clear-headed and excited about where my work is headed. I’m unpausing this newsletter and will be hitting your inboxes once a week from now on. I’m switching paid subscriptions back on as well. Thank you to everyone who has stuck around with me so far — this year is going to be a big one.

So, Trump 2.0 is somehow even more apocalyptic than our worst nightmares. The news cycle is a gateway to hell. The scariest part is that Elon Musk and a team of interns have reportedly been given access to the Treasury Department’s payments system, which manages five trillion dollars of US government money. Trumpism always makes people draw comparisons to the past, but there is no moment in history where the world’s most powerful country let the world’s richest man run wild inside a five trillion dollar bank account, a few weeks after he did a nazi salute in front of the entire world. We are truly witnessing history being made. It is terrifying and it is very real.

The American election was always going to cast a long shadow over, well, everything, but what’s different this time around is that so many powerful people are pretending that what’s happening is kinda normal, or worse, bending over to kiss the ring. A recent piece in Business of Fashion pondered Is Fashion Learning to Love the Trumps?, which is a very good question to ask when members of the Arnault family were sitting at the inauguration, Ivanka Trump was wearing Dior and Givenchy on the big day and one of the industry’s most well-known critics praised the guy who dressed the new First Lady.

The first thing we need to understand here is that the people at the top of the fashion industry — actually, any industry — do not spend much time thinking about anything other than their own business. The second is that if you’re running a business with a big footprint in the US, then Trump can really fuck with your shit. And that’s the big difference between Trump 1 and Trump 2. He’s made it very clear this time around that he will be running the world’s superpower like Tony Soprano, and if you don’t play nice then he is going to make your life hell.

Just look at Mark Zuckerberg. In August, Trump threatened to throw him in prison. In December, Meta made a $1m donation to the Trump inauguration fund. On January 7th, Meta axed its fact checking program, and three days later, its commitments to diversity. Ten days after that and Zuck is sitting front row at the inauguration. The background to all of this is that Zuck needs the US government on his side so he can fend off Tik Tok and all the pissed off governments around the world that want to regulate Meta. Better to be in Trump’s pocket than on his hit list.

I would be very surprised if the people at the top of the fashion industry weren’t making similar calculations. The fact that so many members of the Arnault family were at the inauguration is a sign of where things are headed. Let’s imagine for a second that LVMH was looking to buy an American brand — let’s say The Row — or was facing tariffs on exporting bags into the US. Do you want the mob boss running the world’s biggest economy on your side or not?

And if it’s clear that Big Fashion is getting into bed with the Trump administration, then you can expect everyone else to fall in line as well. No doubt there are many CEOs out there thinking about their DEI programs with a finger hovering over the delete button. Don’t be surprised if we see Ivanka and/or Melania at the Met Gala this year either.

The other thing we need to remember is that the fashion industry in 2025 is completely out of balance. It looks like a dumbbell. Big at the ends, narrow in the middle. If you’re ultra-cheap or ultra-expensive, then you’re having a great time, because there’s a lot of people struggling and a lot of people who have so much fucking money. This is why luxury prices since the pandemic were so completely detached from reality.

Trump’s plan for the American economy is going to make income inequality even worse. His massive tax cuts will be excellent for the people buying all the Chanel bags and terrible for everyone else. If his plan goes ahead, we can expect an era of obscene price tags and terrible people flaunting terrible status symbols. Back to Zuckerberg for a second: he wore a $895,500 watch while announcing that he was cutting back on Meta’s fact-checking program. Cool guy.

Things are going to get complicated because even the most morally vacant CEO still has to think about the people working for them. Fashion professionals are generally progressive and open-minded and diverse and they will not feel great if their bosses give in to the world’s angriest mob boss. Trump might be hell-bent on making DEI and corporate sustainability go extinct, but it’s going to be very hard for companies to walk back from their commitments. Once you’ve told the people working for you that you hate racism and/or want to save the planet, they expect it to mean at least something. The obvious answer will be for CEOs to quietly cut all the woke capitalism stuff and hope that nobody notices, but when the next racist cop goes viral and the climate disasters keep coming…that’s where things will get interesting.

The old fashion mindset goes something like this: status can be bought, and we will not ask questions about where the money comes from. That mentality problematic in all sorts of ways but also…it’s old. Many of the people coming up in the industry actually care about what’s going on in the world, and it’s easy to forget that Trump 1.0 also gave us AOC, the George Floyd protests and the Sunrise Movement. All the noise companies were making about civil rights and sustainability were a direct result of people being fucking pissed about the direction the world was headed. That energy isn’t going to go away.

So if you see the people at the top bending the knee to fascism, you can be outraged, or you can forget they even exist and listen to AOC instead.