By Annie Brown
Donald Trump, President of the United States, has defended his daughter against retailers that have stopped stocking her clothing brand.
The tweet follows the news that US department store chain Macy's is under pressure to drop Ivanka Trump's jewellery and clothing line – along with the likes of Neiman Marcus and Nordstrom – adding to what has been a rocky start to Ivanka's political makeover. This week The New York Times have reported that department stores T.J Maxx and Marshalls employees were told to discard Ivanka Trump signs and put her merchandise in with other brands on clothing racks.
Ivanka Trump arrives at Trump Tower in New York.Credit: AP
See, it wasn't meant to go like this. As Margaret Talbot wrote in The New Yorker last year during the presidential campaign, Ivanka was intended to be the glossy haired, empowered, liberal foil to her father's divisive and crude bombast.
She was with him, but also not. She was every woman, she was a "woman who worked" (all part of her brand, see). But also, she was never these things. And now she's finding that out.
"Her quest to float along, empowered but unsullied, beside her father throughout his increasingly ugly campaign has been getting harder and harder," wrote Talbot at the time.
The decision by retailers to remove the Ivanka Trump brand from online and stores (Nordstrom announced that they will no longer carry the line, but will sell out remaining stock, and Neiman Marcus removed the brand's products from its online store) was said to be based on declining sales.
But the decision also follows the grassroots campaign Grab Your Wallet, which called for shoppers to boycott the brands that carried Ivanka and Donald Trump merchandise. As Axios noted, customers have commented on Macy's social feeds asking for them to take similar actions as Nordstrom and Neiman Marcus.
Despite this, a representative from Ivanka Trump's brand (from which Ivanka is said to be stepping away), told Business Insider that business was still good. What's more, the brand was maintaining its "integrity."
"The women behind the brand represent a diverse group of professionals and we are proud to say that the Ivanka Trump brand continues to embody the principles upon which it was founded. It is a company built to inspire women with solution-oriented offerings, created to celebrate and service the many aspects of their lives," said Rosemary K. Young, Ivanka Trump's senior director of marketing, in the statement to Business Insider on Friday afternoon.
Yet, according to a recent poll less than 1 in 4 women would buy an Ivanka-branded item.
It must be said though that Fortune notes Google search interest in the brand has remained steady, and when Ivanka tweeted a link to the dress she wore during the Republican convention, it sold out within an hour.
The boycott isn't something that Trump is too worried about, telling Good Morning America people can make up their own minds and that she has always advocated for women.
"The beauty of America is people can do what they like, but I prefer to talk to the millions, tens of millions of American women who are inspired by the brand and the message that I've created," Ivanka said.
"I never politicised that message," she added. "People who are seeking to politicise it because they may disagree with the politics of my father, there's nothing I can do to change that."
It is perhaps interesting, then, that Chelsea Clinton, another daughter of a president (and a would-be president) has decided to start politicising her own message/"brand".
The thing is though, as Anne Helen Peterson said at BuzzFeed, just like her father, Ivanka turned her lifestyle into her brand. And boy, that kind of "messaging" can get tricky.
"[Ivanka Trump] grew up in a world textured not just by Trump, and his understanding of capitalism and patriarchy, but postfeminism and its cool new stepsister, commodity feminism. She doesn't just embody those ideologies; she wins them. No one is better at suggesting that purchasing clothing is the same as empowerment — and, as such, no one should make more money from that (flawed) principle."
So what happens when that idea of empowerment doesn't sell? Or your clothes are hugely discounted? Or when you've sold yourself on being the liberal counterpart to your father?
Well, then you get a backlash when you post an ill-timed social post of yourself headed to a fancy event on the night that your father has just caused chaos with an executive order travel ban on select Muslim countries.
It may mean that you claw back some kudos for helping to rollback an executive order that would have scrapped Obama-era LGBT protections.
Yet the reactions on Twitter to the latter have been mixed, and there have been reports that the order wasn't ever really in play.
As Andrew Solomon wrote in The New Yorker, being gay in America feels different than it did just a few months ago.
It would seem that not everybody is buying it.