Cnn
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Publisher’s note: featuring the good, the bad and the ugly, “ Look of the week ” is a regular series dedicated to unpacking the most spoken outfit of the last seven days.
The eyes fixed in front, the first lady Melania Trump looks at an incredibly reflective surface – is it a desk, a mirror, a fresh surface of water? – While his perfectly maintained finger holds his balance. This is the kind of power position that you expect from a particularly confident competitor on “The Apprentice”. Instead, this is the 47th official portrait of the First Lady.
Released by the White House on Monday, the photo – captured by the Belgian photographer, Régine Mahaux – has already triggered online discussions. This is the second official portrait of First Lady Trump, and the contrast between the two images is significant. In 2017, the fury around the photo of Trump’s First Lady has greatly focused on her decision to wear Dolce & Gabbana – a clothing choice that shocked fashion watchers in the United States as a missed opportunity to present Americans. Now Trump is dressed with challenge yet another tuxedo jacket at one end of the Italian brand. But this time there are other artistic choices to unpack.
Eight years ago, we were introduced to Trump in Vivid Technicolor: his tanned complexion and his blue eyes piercing perfectly framed inside his caramel scan. Today, viewers are presented with Trump during severe gray. Where there was once a melancholy facial expression of Mona Lisa style – the lips separated enough to suggest a smile or a grimace, depending on the perspective – now there is no room for interpretation. The mouth closed, Trump is firm and resolved. This time, the tables have turned (literally). Instead, it seems that the First Lady analyzes you.
“I love the reflection of herself – representing that Melania Trump is the wife of the practical president – on the current affairs”, ” wrote the journalist of the Washington Times Scott HolleranOn X. But for some, the formidable pose is only that – posing. On social networks, the image was compared to the promotional photos of Claire Underwood, the fictitious first lady of the Netflix series “House of Cards” and Kim Kardashian in a fashion set for the GQ magazine.
But also obtuse, the portrait is a continuation of the soft power messaging communicated by Trump during the inauguration. Her Pleasant style hat Eric JavitzOften positioned to protect her eyes from cameras, was a physical border – keeping everyone, including her husband who was leaning over for a kiss, from a distance. Now, even in the image taken by Mahaux, Trump is further from the camera with a spectator and a subject separating the ocean (or the mirror office).
President Donald Trump also made waves for his official lead draw earlier this month – his steel brightness, immortalized by his chief photographer Daniel Torok, was far from the ear to grid captured in 2017. ” You must ask yourself, if a person deliberately takes this pose, what happens? said John Bolton, the former national security advisor of Trump, in an interview with Kaitlan Collins of CNN.
The two Trumps saw the power of a striking image by modifying the power by modifying public opinion. In July 2024, dramatic photos President Trump surviving an assassination attempt at a republican rally in Pennsylvania flooded the Internet. Blood-Anked with a fist in the air, surrounded by secret service agents, dynamic photographs made Trump a heroic aberrant value. Even his detractors were forced to agree. “The one who tried to kill him failed”, ” wrote Benjamin Wallace Wells in the New Yorker. “It is already the indelible image of our time of political crisis and conflict.”
All photos cannot be checked – as the Pennsylvania proves – but after several years of its Image being even obliviousThe president takes on the optics more seriously. Now it seems that the first lady has removed a sheet from her husband’s book. Both seek to reframe the perception of the public, one image at a time.