Slobs deploring Trudeaus in Vogue need makeover
If only this could be the last word on Sophie Grégoire-Trudeau and Justin Trudeau appearing in a painterly marital portrait in Vogue Magazine this week. But I suspect the two will again appear in public while attractive, and again the dogs will bark.
Vogue has long done words-andphotos profiles of political couples — witness the Obamas — but it’s unusual to see Canadians in an American magazine. Stephen Harper was never invited to show off his armoured limousine and hair. But the Trudeaus are new, intellectual and have an eye for fashion. Being from Montreal, style matters to them as it does not to schlub male journalists deploring the Trudeaus’ undignified presence in a “women’s magazine.”
Once it was niqabs, now it’s Oscar de la Renta cocktail dresses. Are all Canadians’ hostilities cloth-based? I checked online photos of one male Ottawa reporter — a fine journalist — who was particularly angry about Vogue. He wore a suit that flapped in the wind like a mainsail. The drab reporters in Spotlight were Zoolander compared to him.
What cloth would satisfy him, I wondered. For men, canvas suits à la Harper. For women, anything sewn from Mountain Equipment Co-op tent fabric. Men — and women — who deplore a) attractive clothing and b) married couples embracing should take a hard look at themselves. I take a hard look at them, and men do not like it.
In 2012, Conservative MP Stephen Woodworth, stalwart of the Kitchener anti-abortion movement and since defeated, tried to take me to the Ontario Press Council for mocking his suits. It was the idea of this dull grey man — he looks “like a passport photo with an iron deficiency,” I wrote — thinking he had a say on women’s bodies and lives that offended me.
I said he was a “guy in a blue suit, blue shirt and blue tie,” and a man so indistinct I couldn’t pick him out of a police lineup even after one of his droning anti-abortion speeches. It was then I learned that dull, plodding Conservative men hate their clothes being criticized by fancy female journalists who should know their place.
His complaint was five close-typed pages. The council rejected it, calling my work fair comment. See? Even they didn’t like his outfits.
Back to the Vogue photo. Trudeau was wearing his usual well-cut suit while Grégoire-Trudeau was wearing a deep blue lace dress — a strapless underlayer, lace sheath with sleeves, and bold embroidered gold Van Gogh flowers wrapping themselves onto the blue. It was a shockingly happy dress.
The Ottawa reporter complained Grégoire-Trudeau was wearing a “French designer.” I take it meaning “snobby.” Wrong. De la Renta was from the Dominican Republic. Second, he died in 2014 at 82, and Peter Copping, formerly of Nina Ricci, has taken over. De la Renta sold big fussy ballgowns to Republicans — I detest them — and complained that Michelle Obama wouldn’t wear them. With her characteristic kindness, she did during his final illness.
Copping is making prettier, gentler clothes. Vogue’s promoting him to help maintain this great name in design. None of these things would have been apparent to staid newspapers who long ago shoved fashion onto the women’s pages and then discarded it.
Most editors are like the humou- rist David Sedaris’s dad, who thought his daughters should marry and his sons work. His sons’ “bodies were viewed as mere vehicles, pasty, potbellied machines designed to transport their thoughts from one place to another,” Sedaris wrote. Sedaris might drink pancake batter from the jug, but his four daughters were called “Flossie” if they put on a pound.
That mindset rose like dough this week. In the photo, Trudeau looks at his wife directly, she looks slightly away. He is perched on a desk, she is standing. He looks ardent; she is in an intense moment.
I know what she was thinking. “Hadrien won’t eat, maybe dye courgettes blue? Stupid renovators. Maggie right, 24 Sussex doomed. Is my big toe bleeding?” Trudeau’s thinking: “If that Senate blocks me once, just watch me. Sophie’s pinching me. Secret exit signal or about to faint?” I mean, they are married. Samuel Pepys had a snappy wardrobe, as did the Romans, which Juvenal noticed nearly 2,000 years ago. I don’t mind if Ottawa pundits dress like cat flaps, but not everyone does. After watching International Trade Minister (and my former editor) Chrystia Freeland’s fabulous dress on cabinet swearing-in day, I finally bought my first red dress, by Zero+Maria Cornejo, and my daughter a navy Moose Knuckles parka as worn by Grégoire-Trudeau.
I saw, I liked it, I bought it. It’s 2015: women do this and their husbands embrace them. hmallick@thestar.ca