One wag wrote: “I always thought that dress looked like an unmade bed.” 😂
Melania Trump’s gigantic Galliano-era Dior wedding gown from 2005 is up for sale…on eBay. The dress is going for $45,000—or best offer. This is bizarre, buyable history on a super public forum.
My friend Patricia Torvalds, who is addicted to Meadham Kirchhoff and knows too much about art, is getting married soon and hit the nuptial motherlode while searching eBay for wedding dresses. Patricia stumbled upon the First Lady’s spring 2005 Couture Christian Dior confectionery gown after she typed in “‘80s Dior dress”. Then, the Galliano-era Dior Trump dress popped up under sponsored posts. “Christian Dior wedding dress specifically designed by John Galliano for Melania trump’s wedding in 2005 to Donald Trump. United States PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP!” reads the description.
Patricia said it all when she described the look as “heavy.” The Dior creation is undoubtedly epic. Here are some stats: The dress had a major Vogue moment when Melania wore it for her February 2005 cover. According to Vogue, it was made of 90 meters of satin and took 550 hours to complete. When I looked up the dress today, Page Six claimed it weighed 60 pounds and was embroidered with 1,500 crystals. (The Massapequa-based seller says that the crystals are Swarovski). In one photo, the current owner holds a section of the dress with her single Pepto Pink Louis Vuitton monogrammed nail tip to show the zipper, which is surrounded by the scattering of crystals and the curled silver foliage embroidery. The eBay photos of the details are incredible. When else can you see a couture piece up this close and personal? VogueRunway, take note.
The dress’s Vogue moment was photographed by Mario Testino, styled by Tonne Goodman, and written by Sally Singer. A holy fashion trinity, if you will. And let’s not forget the hair by Orlando Pita and the makeup by Tom Pecheux. These are the big beauty guns.
After all, the wedding was a huge or, in Trumpspeak, a yuge deal. The severe Slovenian bombshell, then Melania Knauss, met with Vogue editor-in-chief Anna Wintour and her to-be “couture mentor” André Leon Talley, who guided her through the fittings process. “So before you could say Ljubljana, it was off to Paris in July for the Haute Couture,” Singer wrote, trailing Melania through the whole show-going moment. The photos show Melania in the upper echelon fashion thick of it: Air kissing with Karl Lagerfeld, getting fitted by Olivier Theyskens, and posing backstage with John Galliano. She was with everyone who mattered. Except for Jean Paul Gaultier, who was “too theatrical for her taste.” In the editorial, there’s a photo of three Dior couturiers dressed in black, measuring, holding, touching, and inspecting Melania’s strapless Dior dress. Tiered knife pleats at the hem! Then, amoniates of more pleats boasting a plexus of embroidery in the center; a glinting black hole of whipped, metallic florals! A frothing veil that billowed over her crown like a cumulus cloud. The dress reportedly cost over $100,000.
So, how did the First Lady’s dress end up…on eBay? Patricia got some information via eBay messages: It’s a friend-of-a-friend situation. The seller said she was a friend of one of Melania’s friends who brokered the deal so she could buy it from Mrs. Trump. She purchased it for $70,000 for her own wedding back in 2011. Since then, the Dior dress has sat in a box, which I imagine, like the dress, is absolutely enormous. The seller photographed the dress hanging off a paneled door, which almost reaches from floor to ceiling. The gown is surrounded by gilded, neo-classical furniture. I spotted a Versace-style Medusa bust in the room.
The more public information is in the item’s description, like the tinkering of the dress over the years. First, it was Melania who made some changes. According to Vogue: “All the flaps over breasts disappeared,” and “the girdle was nipped so that the bride’s figure would not be lost in the extraordinary volume of the skirt.” The eBay seller’s alterations included a new layer of satin on the bottom, embroidery pieces on the top, and more fabric on the back of the dress. There are also added straps because the seller’s chest was larger than Melania’s.
The dealer also sells an eternity wedding band that she modeled off the First Lady’s. She purchased it for $58,000,00 on 47th Street in New York City’s Diamond District. (It was appraised for $74,000 by GIA.) “It’s amazing!!!! And huge!!! Every girls dream!!! One of a kind I designed it myself,” she writes. The seller also has a trove of print-forward and bodycon designer pieces. Some hits include a vintage scarf print Hermes top with a gathered waist, staggeringly high python Christian Louboutin platform heels, and a pink Christian Dior sports bra and pant set.
Now, back to the dress. Whether the photos on eBay or the Vogue article, everything about the wedding gown leans… gargantuan. Like Costco-bulk proportions. The dress is just so massive. There’s talk of the dress fitting into the equally mammoth Maybach. I mean, look at it: Melania and her colossal ivory frock take up two-thirds of the Vogue cover! “This is a heavy dress, Melania, so eat, drink, and be healthy, or you will faint,” said Talley in the article. Galliano’s designs always had impressive breadth. Titanic big! A full-on production. An expansive fit that was, well, fit for Mar-a-Lago!
Currently, the dress is in one person’s cart, but in eBay lingo, that means it’s still ripe for the buying. Though a note: The dress will probably come in its own shipping container.
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This article lifted from…
https://neverworns.substack.com/p/melania-trumps-wedding-dress-is-for
