Fashion show attendees may have made Tiffany Trump a front-row pariah, but they weren’t the only ones at New York Fashion Week out to make a point about President Donald Trump.
Designer Prabal Gurung, who has dressed everyone from Oprah to the Duchess of Cambridge, finished his Fall 2017 show with models wearing t-shirts that said everything from “the future is female,” to Mitch McConnell’s now-infamous quote about Elizabeth Warren, “nevertheless, she persisted.”
The one that received the most applause read, “we should all be feminists.”
Gurung said that he was inspired by the Women’s March on Washington, leading him to design pricey statement clothing that ladies could wear while “resisting” the current President.
“They set an example for the rest of us that by peaceful resistance, we can make some changes. It took women to do that. So I wanted to capture that,” Gurung told The Hollywood Reporter. “I wanted to capture what I felt there.”
The designer himself came out wearing a shirt that said “this is what a feminist looks like.” It wasn’t unlike the tees—sported by Lena Dunham, Benedict Cumberbatch and various other people—that were pulled from the market last year after journalists discovered they’d been made by women in third-world sweatshops.
Gurung, of course, wasn’t the only one to make “strong women” the theme of his fashion show. Other designers felt they also had a platform—displays of one-of-a-kind fashions, sent down the runway in front of a mostly agreeable crowd, largely off the radar of any Trump voter—to make political statements as well.
Some agendas were overt. The Council of Fashion Designers of America, for example, which fights against Fashion Week knockoffs turning up at your local fast fashion emporium, gave out badges in support of Planned Parenthood.
Others were harder to discern. Christian Siriano sent models down the runway wearing t-shirts that said, profoundly, “people are people.” Jeremy Scott made a comment on the entertainment-obsessed voter pool with his dresses and shirts featuring historical icons like Marie Antoinette. Alexander Wang’s models had tights that said, simply, “no after-party.”
There’s no fun in the new Trumpian world, apparently.
Public School showed an iconic Trump hat, but with the words “Make America New York,” and sweatshirts that said “we need leaders,” but were coy about their exact purpose in the ongoing fight against Trump’s agenda. It was more about “constantly examining your beliefs, values and privileges,” the duo told the New York Times.
All of these “political statements” range in price from $125 (for a specially designed protest shirt designed by Jonathan Simkhai), to around $400 for a Jeremy Scott dress. Gurung’s tees have not hit store shelves, but are likely to retail for around $100.
If Trump has done nothing else in his first few weeks as President, he’s at least made politics into a fashion trend—and kept a few designers very rich.