Fashion Week’s Anti-Trump Runway Politics

On Monday last week, at her eighteenth-floor atelier on West Thirty-seventh Street, in the garment district, the French fashion designer Sophie Theallet showed me her fall collection. For the past two seasons, she has eschewed the traditional runway show during New York Fashion Week, preferring not to compete with the mega-labels’ theatrics. Theallet, who worked for years as the first assistant to the couturier and shoe designer Azzedine Alaïa, is known for the dresses she crafts in materials such as raffia and feathers—which, she said, in any case, are better seen up close. Her new collection features thick, exposed shoulder pads, some embroidered with thin metal shingles. “Armor D’Amour,” as she called it, is a collection for the embattled. Last November, Theallet became the first U.S. designer to break with fashion’s traditional apolitical stance when she publicly announced that she would not dress First Lady Melania Trump. She was followed by others, including Marc Jacobs and Tom Ford.