Dress Shops

Donald Trump Doesn’t Understand Inauguration Dress Sales—or Online Shopping at All, It Seems

In addition to stores in Washington, D.C., having plenty of dresses on hand for buyers to wear to the inauguration, Trump’s bold claim ignores online retailers, where even his wife shops.
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Donald Trump, right, with Melania Trump at the front row of the Michael Kors fall fashion week collection presentation in New York, 2007.By Kathy Willens/A.P. Images/Rex/Shutterstock.

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President-Elect Donald Trump responded to the anti-Trump speech that Meryl Streep gave at Sunday's Golden Globes in a way that will feel familiar by now: He called the actress “overrated” and went on to make a few more lofty claims. “We are going to have an unbelievable, perhaps record-setting turnout for the inauguration, and there will be plenty of movie and entertainment stars,” Trump told The New York Times in a phone call after the Globes. “All the dress shops are sold out in Washington. It’s hard to find a great dress for this inauguration.”

Are all the dress shops in Washington sold out? The short answer is “no, of course not.” A few calls to local stores in the D.C. area and 10 minutes of online browsing will debase the claim. Though there may be higher-than-usual dress demand in the area ahead of the weekend’s events, Trump’s exaggeration still betrays a misunderstanding of how Washingtonians and Americans overall shop—and how many e-commerce-heavy retailers are run. This includes the shopping habits of his wife, Melania. Her spokeswoman said she procured the white dress she wore to the Republican National Convention in July from the online-only retailer Net-a-Porter.

Go-to black-tie retailers like Intermix and Saks Fifth Avenue both confirmed that they currently have plenty of stock in their D.C.-area stores. A sales associate at Intermix’s Georgetown location told Vanity Fair Monday morning that though she hadn’t heard Trump’s words yet, the store has “a great selection of dresses or formal outfits. We have a heavy events-based clientele.” An employee at Saks Fifth Avenue at Tyson’s Corner in Fairfax County, Virginia, said the store has “20 to 30 long gowns. We definitely have formal, longer pieces,” depending on the size needed.

One boutique owner, Peter Marx of Saks Jandel in Chevy Chase, went even further, telling People, “There’s never been less demand for inaugural ballgowns in my 38 years.”

Even if there was a shortage of dresses in the Capitol, Rent the Runway, for example, offers hundreds of thousands of gowns that even Trump might consider “great.” A representative from the service confirmed to Vanity Fair that attendees could order one day prior to the event by three P.M. E.S.T. and still receive their gown on January 20 (for those who don’t want to risk cutting it that close, the brand has a number of brick-and-mortar locations where customers can make an appointment to try on gowns, including a Georgetown space). Rent the Runway’s site has an entire section dedicated to “Inauguration Gowns,” with 266 distinct styles available for perusal, and a representative told Vanity Fair over e-mail, “We have thousands of styles available for D.C.based customers for inauguration weekend.”

The president-elect’s own daughter Ivanka Trump knows the value of e-commerce; her eponymous brand no longer has a brick-and-mortar store, but maintains a robust online and wholesale selection. Trump should understand women’s purchasing habits better than he’s letting on, but his odd claim is not only patently untrue, it dismisses the existence of a huge and growing chunk of the retail sector. Then again, “computers” and “the cyber” have always proven testy subjects for the president-elect, who usually only obliquely invokes the technology in reference to Russian hacking scandals. Like he said in his only press conference outside his Mar-a-Lago resort since the summer, “I think that computers have complicated lives very greatly. The whole age of the computer has made it where nobody knows exactly what’s going on.”