Fashion faux pas

Melania wore stilettos to visit Hurricane Harvey damage, and Twitter’s having a field day

Twitterers are working themselves into a debilitating meme-producing frenzy after photos emerged of Donald Trump and First Lady Melania Trump languorously departing the White House on Tuesday morning to assess the Hurricane Harvey damage in Texas.

Related: But of course Donald Trump is using Hurricane Harvey to promote his new $40 campaign hats

In what’s proven to become a controversial fashion choice, Melania decided the occasion called for a bomber jacket, tight black jeans, and hell-a-rockin’ stiletto heels. It’s that last detail people are having a hard time wrapping their head around.

As Washington Post’s Robin Givhan put it:

Observers were baffled by her shoes in particular. Those shoes. Those shoes. Good Lord, those shoes. She is fond of Manolos and Louboutins. But it’s not the brand or the cost: It’s the heels. She defies gravity in them. She floats above it all. They aren’t power heels; they’re sexy heels. Heading off to Texas, she looked dressed to view a natural disaster from a distance, from on high, not up close.

The decision also galled The New York Times’ fashion writer Vanessa Friedman:

When is a shoe not just a shoe?

When it is a pair of very high, needle-thin heels worn by the first lady of the United States on her way to the site of a natural disaster. Then it becomes a symbol for what many see as the disconnect between the Trump administration and reality; another example of the way in which this president and his family continue to define “appropriate” their own way; and an excuse for partisan name-calling.

While it’s true Mrs. Trump had changed by the time the plane landed in Texas — she entered the state wearing white sneakers, white T-shirt, and a baseball cap with the word “FLOTUS” across the front — that didn’t stop the American people from falling into a highly suggestive alpha state to begin conceiving stiletto-fixated memes at an alarming rate.

Here’s how that’s been going:

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