Green dress: First lady’s subtle message?
On the final night of the Republican National Convention, the first lady made another inscrutable fashion choice. She appeared wearing a flowing dress immediately dubbed the “green screen dress” by poets, politicians and pundits.
Following on the heels of her previous night’s Eastern Bloc military-esque choice, Melania Trump had both fashionistas and late-night comedians trying to decipher her sartorial code.
We so rarely hear the first lady speak for herself that in our efforts to know her we are reduced to amateur analyses of her every action, her every mercurial smile, frown and hair flip, her every pair of Louboutins, as we look for some deeper meaning.
Maybe we aren’t being fair. Maybe there is no deeper meaning.
Perhaps choices like the pussy-bow blouse she wore after the revelation of the president’s “pussy” audio tape, or the white pant suit — the unofficial suffragist’s uniform — she wore to her husband’s State of the Union speech right after the Stormy Daniels story broke, are simply coincidences. Still, it’s pretty hard to ignore her infamous “I Don’t Care” jacket as she visited youthful immigrants and asylum-seekers detained on the U.S. southern border.
So what about that green dress? Today even the most casual TV viewer or moviegoer is familiar with the use of green-screen technology in television and film production. The screen is used to substitute an image when the actual environment is not what the producer wants to show. When your favorite weather forecaster is standing in front of the map with changing scenes behind him or her, they’re actually standing in front of a green screen.
The screen itself is blank and innocuous; it only acquires meaning by way of what is projected onto it.
Which, perhaps, makes a green-screen dress the perfect choice for this first lady, the cipher wife, who rarely hints at an opinion of her own, leaving us to — fairly or not — imagine her as a projection of the president and his die-hard base, along with the distorted world view they promulgate, far from the reality we know.
The four nights of the Republican National Convention were an exercise in UN-reality TV; where malignant fantasies were presented as truths. Where Trump was disingenuously portrayed, by himself and others, as the Great Virus Killer, Ally of Black and Brown Folk, Economic Genius, Guardian of Safe Suburbs, and a tender, caring Great White Father to his beloved nation (under God). Meanwhile, the Democrats were repeatedly cast as godless anarchists, burning down our cities, giving away our hard-won earnings and killing our babies.
What could be more fitting to wear at the court of the man who can tell no truth, who must fabricate and prevaricate a world of absolute power, ever in need of his — and his only — absolute rule and wisdom?
For this, a green-screen dress would be perfect. Then again, maybe it was just a dress.