Fashion and politics go well together especially when you think about heads of state, ministers or party leaders using a tailored suit or a specific colour to highlight their roles and project their power at key meetings and speeches. Yet, at times this alchemy simply doesn't work, as proved by the case of Ivanka Trump, who recently announced she is closing her New York-based fashion brand. She took this decision since, as senior adviser to her father, she stated she needs to focus on work in Washington, but there may be other reasons behind the end of her brand.
Ivanka Trump launched her accessories company in 2007, but she soon expanded into other categories, including clothes, sportswear and footwear.
A company estimated at $100 million before Trump's presidency, Ivanka's brand had the potential to grow even faster after the election and there was actually a growth in interest immediately afterwards.
The brand's appeal started to go down, though, for a series of reasons that included labour-related issues and Donald Trump's policies.
Last February the brand received some major blows when Nordstrom and Belk dropped it; then Neiman Marcus stopped selling Ivanka Trump's jewellery on their site.
At the same time anti-Trump activist group Grab Your Wallet launched an online campaign to boycott Trump products and the companies carrying them.
The brand kept on being associated with her role of "daughter of the US President", even after Ivanka took a leave of absence from her company and from her executive role at the Trump Organization to avoid potential conflicts of interest.
It is undeniable that the aggressive behaviour and deranged policies of her father have damaged Ivanka's fashion brand: even though all the retailers who stopped stocking Ivanka Trump's products claimed their choice was due to performance issues, Nordstrom dumped Ivanka's fashion label after the first Muslim travel ban became effective; Canadian retailer Hudson Bay also stopped selling her brand both online and in its stores after Trump's imposition of tariffs on Canadian goods (while Macy dropped Trump's own line of suits and ties soon after the US President called Mexicans rapists).
That said, while an aggressive, unfair and barbarously brutal (read separating immigrant children from their parents...), racist and xenophobic tendency in the administration is probably the first and foremost cause of (understandable) disappointment in consumers, probably one of the main saboteurs of Ivanka's brand is probably her own hypocritical self: at public events and speeches, Ivanka always claimed she wanted to empower women, but her brand didn't seem too interested in doing so as reports highlighted that the workers at the Chinese factories supplying the footwear for her brand (many of them women) were subjected to dishuman overtime/production quota and verbal and physical abuse.
Besides, Trump always boasted about "Made in America" products, but both him and his daughter manufacture products in China. Talking about the Far East, well, Ivanka won several trademarks in China before her father announced he would attempt to reverse a US ban on Chinese telecommunications company ZTE.
On top of it all, even after Ivanka stepped back from her company, she continued to profit from it and to wear her own brand's garments and accessories (which brought a class action lawsuit against her brand in March 2007, followed by a letter by watchdog group Democracy Forward to the Office of Government Ethics in January asking to investigate the fact that she was using her position to promote her products).
Yet there may be more reasons behind this choice of closing down the brand: the big news in economy and politics today regarded US President Donald Trump and Jean-Claude Juncker, the European commission president, trying to arrange a deal to work towards "zero" tariffs, barriers and subsidies on non-auto industrial goods, but the US President also seems busy working on a trade war with China (and never sorted out the situation with Mexico and Canada...). If Donald Trump decides to levy a total of $500 billion in tariffs on Chinese imports, the garments and accessories markets will be affected, so Ivanka probably abandoned the ship before it sank, proving that she is definitely using her position within the administration to access to vital information for her own benefit.
Who knows what will happen to the remaining stock – will it be rebranded (that wouldn't be surprising considering that G-III Apparel Group, the company producing Ivanka Trump sportswear, dresses and coats, allegedly rebranded some products a while back claiming they were designed by another G-III-owned brand - Adrienne Vittadini - to make them more palatable to consumers...), will it be discounted or maybe burnt H&M/Burberry style? Who knows, yet now that she's out of fashion, we can only hope that Donald Trump will soon be out of business as well.
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