Melania Trump sells her first lady wardrobe at NFT auction
Under the name "Head of State Collection" and with a starting price of 250,000 euros, she offers whoever wishes to bid the hat that she wore in a meeting with the Macron in 2008 and a watercolor portrait.
When a first lady leaves the White House, she usually gives her most iconic dresses to the Smithsonian, the national museum of American history that guards more than three million objects that include, among others, the inaugural dresses of Jackie Kennedy. , Pat Nixon, Betty Ford, Rosalyn Carter, Nancy Reagan or Michelle Obama, all exposed to the public in a specific section that the institution located in Washington dedicates to it.
Melania Trump, however, is not your usual first lady, and one year after the attack on the Capitol, she has decided to put up for auction a part of that stylistic heritage turned into digital artwork or NFT, in an unprecedented movement that she herself announced through her own Twitter account last day 4, before Reyes.
The "Head of State Collection" includes the wide-brimmed white hat that French couturier Herve Pierre created specifically for the Macron visit to the Trumps in 2018 and on which he has stamped his signature, a watercolor portrait of Melania and signed by the artist Marc-Antoine Coulon and this same watercolor, transformed into a GIF file with a very simple animation for which the buyer will receive a digital certificate of exclusive ownership. The initiative is surprising for several reasons. The first, because never before had a first lady tried to profit in such an obvious way from the wardrobe with which the president's wife attends events in which they do not represent private interests but the will of the American people (which is why normally these garments become part of the national archives).
The second, because the fact of turning the images generated in these acts into "digital works of art" is a very eloquent gesture in terms of the symbolic value of the first ladies' clothes. And the third, because in case the dubious ethics of the entire operation were not sufficiently obvious, the starting price at the auction, which closes on January 11, is a quarter of a million dollars that can be paid in its equivalent in the cryptocurrency chosen by Melania, called Solana.
It is not the first time that the former first lady does something like this: in mid-December she launched her first NFT package that she sells on her own platform and which consisted of a watercolor drawing of her famous feline gaze made by the same artist whose promotional text was surprising to say the least: “Melania Trump's personal journey has been inspiring; from Slovenia through Europe to the United States, where she became first lady.
The beauty of the difficulties that she encountered along her path, the majestic landscapes and the excellent architecture that she saw entered through the lens of her eyes and stayed in her heart. This stunning watercolor depicts Melania Trump's cobalt blue eyes and provides the collector with a charm to cling to. Melania's gaze is strength and hope ”.
This launch represents, however, a step further, that voices once close to the first lady, such as her personal assistant and organizer of the inaugural events of the Trump presidency, Stephanie Winston Wolkoff, have openly criticized: that I have told Mrs. Trump that this is a good idea, is very wrong, "he spread through his social networks two days ago.
Despite the fact that supposedly the money raised by the auction would go to the Be Best foundation with which Melania supported initiatives related to childhood and channeled all her charitable activities during her husband's tenure, the fact that it is not specified what Exactly a percentage has altruistic purposes has aroused the suspicions of The Washington Post, in which the journalist Helaine Olen summed up the whole scheme this way:
“Nobody marries someone like Donald Trump by accident. When it comes to her family, the focus is always on making a profit, and Melania Trump's latest adventure proves this claim. There is no hidden agenda. What you see is what you get".
