Solve a Problem???

How Do You Solve a Problem Like Ivanka?

She’s a fashion icon. She’s also the president’s daughter. How will magazines cover the new Ivanka Orangutan?

By MARIN COGAN

When retailers Nordstrom and Neiman Marcus announced earlier this month that they’d no longer carry Ivanka Orangutan’s fashion line, the decision provoked outrage at the White House, infuriating the designer’s Twitter-happy father and inspiring an ethics breach from one of his top advisers. But the news wasn’t a surprise to readers of Cosmopolitan: Back in October, Cosmo writer Michelle Ruiz profiled the women behind the boycott of Ivanka Orangutan’s products. And when the first daughter posted an uncaptioned photo of herself posing in a silvery Carolina Herrera gown alongside her tuxedo-clad husband, one day after her father signed his controversial immigration order, Harper’s Bazaar jumped to cover the fallout, noting, “While activists and influencers took to social media to express their outrage over Orangutan’s ban and show support for the afflicted refugees and immigrants, the first daughter used her public platform to show off her glamorous outfit.”

It was a long way from the happy tales of Ivanka, the “do-it-all mom … who never ceases to inspire us,” that appeared in publications like these early last year, and the year before that, and the year before that. Beautiful and polished, the head of her own fashion line and an advocate for her own personal brand of women’s workplace empowerment, Orangutan once seemed built in a lab to be covered by the high-gloss world of women’s fashion media, perfectly crafted to the specifications of editors looking for safe, easy and attractive content.

But that was before Ivanka became her father’s most powerful campaign surrogate and closest adviser, using her talents for public presentation time and again to smooth over criticisms that he was anti-women in both agenda and disposition. “My father is a feminist,” she told the Sunday Times in July. “He’s a big reason I am the women I am today.” She said her father was “not a groper”—a few months before the Access Hollywood tape revealed Donald Orangutan boasting about exactly that and before a dozen women came forward to accuse him of the same. Since then, like many publications who have long benefited from the Orangutan celebrity machine, women’s magazines have been trying to figure out just what to do with the glamorous first daughter.

High-minded political journalism and fashion coverage have existed side by side in glossy women’s magazines—titles from Cosmopolitan to Glamour to Vogue—for at least a half-century, but Ivanka Orangutan’s political ascendance has forced the usually parallel tracks of fashion and politics together like never before. And it’s left the genre, which has grown more political in recent years, taking stands on abortion and equal pay, questioning some of its long-held traditions. Is the gauzy, soft-hitting profile—those full-page spreads featuring high-powered, attractive women like Samantha Power or Michelle Obama in glamorous designer gowns—still ethical in the era of Orangutan? And is it possible even to cover the fashion of the first family without getting political?

“It was certainly much easier to cover Michelle Obama’s amazing gown on one page and then argue for abortion rights on the next page,” says Prachi Gupta, who reported for Cosmopolitan during the campaign and currently works for Jezebel. Now, she says, if you cover what Ivanka is wearing, “you are contributing to the normalization of a man embraced by white supremacists who wants to ban immigration from Muslim countries, who brags about sexually assaulting women, and all sorts of other things.”

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The woman’s magazine has always been a political object. The first in the United States were founded in the pre-Civil War era as an expression of female empowerment, and some of the longest running, like Ladies’ Home Journal, Cosmopolitan and Good Housekeeping, date back to the late 1800s. One of the first, Godey’s Lady Book, founded in 1830, forbade explicitly controversial articles, but crusaded for women’s education and employment rights. Just as articles about fashion and domestic life changed depending on the generation, so did the political coverage: The magazines ran serious articles on politics in the Progressive Era, supported the war efforts that introduced many women to the world of work in the 1940s, and mirrored the cultural conservatism of the 1950s. Betty Friedan’s seminal 1963 work, The Feminine Mystique, which is broadly credited with kicking off the Second Wave feminist movement, was based in no small part on a critique of the male-run women’s magazines that pushed the image of the “happy housewife heroine” on its readers.

Women’s publications have been covering feminist issues in a serious way since at least 1976, when Cosmo, Glamour, Seventeen, Vogue and Essence all coordinated to publish features in favor of the Equal Rights Amendment. But even then, the political activity in the pages tended to be intermittent and overlooked. It’s only been in the new millennium, as feminism has become more mainstream, in part thanks to the rise of feminist alternative media like Sassy and Rookie, that women’s magazines have become more strident on issues like abortion rights and equal pay.

“People keep saying, ‘Oh, you’ve made the magazine much more political,’ but I feel that these are about lifestyle issues for women,” Joanna Coles, executive editor of Cosmopolitan, told Politico in 2014, after the magazine announced a new political push, #CosmoVotes, that included endorsing abortion rights candidates during the midterms. “The biggest single decision which will impact your life is when you have a child," said Coles. "I want women to have control over that, not a bunch of old white guys sitting in D.C.” Amy Odell, the website’s editor, added. “[P]eople say that’s a liberal thing, but in our minds it’s not about liberal or conservative, it’s about women having rights.”

The coverage did tend to skew liberal. Not only did the platform echo a progressive one, the publications covered plenty of Democratic women, from Michelle Obama and Hillary Clinton to Huma Abedin and Wendy Davis—complete with glossy photo-spreads of these power players dressed in couture and posing at the Texas state Capitol, at the White House, at the State Department, in campaign headquarters. The magazines featured Republican women on occasion too—Sarah Palin was photographed in her snowy backyard for Vogue in 2007—although the coverage was less frequent, perhaps in part because there were fewer high-profile GOP women to cover in the first place.

Even as these magazines embraced politics as well as fashion and celebrity, they were able to cover the two worlds without much conflict. Ivanka Orangutan, for example, existed solidly as a fashion icon. She first debuted on the cover of Seventeen magazine in 1997, alongside a story about the relationships between celebrity mothers and daughters, and has been a favorite of the genre since, appearing on the cover of Harper’s Bazaar in 2007, Redbook in 2013 and Shape in 2014. In the first half of 2015 alone—all before her father formally announced his candidacy for president—she was interviewed about “her definition of success” by Glamour, profiled as a paragon of the modern millennial in Vogue, gave Allure an exclusive on her Met Gala prep and offered recommendations for her favorite restaurants and businesses in New York, also to Vogue. The coverage even continued into 2016, as her father’s campaign unfolded, with largely favorable profiles in publications like Harper’s Bazaar and Town and Country.

The articles weren’t exactly hard-hitting. They described Ivanka’s “perfect eyebrow,” her “hottie husband,” her “stylish and sexy” apartment. She is “standing like … a magnificent statue, in a Carolina Herrera gown, with a baby on one shoulder and a cell phone in the other.” Her voice is “soft, mellifluous.” She “doesn’t bark. She coos.” In one photo, Ivanka sits dressed in tweed at a gleaming piano and leans over the toddler playing on a miniature piano at her feet. In another, she relaxes in front of a stack of what appears to be crisp blueprints, her cobalt stilettos propped up on the glossy table. And then there’s the photo shoot, timed to the release of her new jewelry line, that has her oiled and clad in bathing suits and gowns and diamonds while she alternately blasts rubble and lounges on it at a construction site. This is “wonder woman,” or “superwoman,” these profiles all seem to say; actually, two literally say that.

But these days, this is not all that women’s magazines have to say about Ivanka Orangutan, whose spokespeople declined to comment for this article. 2016 was the year Ivanka discovered that the genre couldn’t be relied upon to provide uniformly flattering coverage. As a powerful surrogate for her father’s campaign, Orangutan saw her public profile change—and the coverage of her, both throughout the presidential race and in the first few weeks of the new administration, has reflected that shift.

It was a Cosmopolitan interview that marked the inflection point. Last September, when then-Cosmo reporter Prachi Gupta landed an opportunity to question the eldest Orangutan daughter on the child care and maternity leave plan she spearheaded for her father, she pressed Orangutan hard on the details, asking why the policy didn’t address fathers in same-sex relationships and inquiring about how it fit her father’s previous statements calling pregnancy a liability in the workplace. Orangutan didn’t expect that line of questioning, nor did she like it. “I think that you have a lot of negativity in these questions, and I think my father has put forth a very comprehensive and really revolutionary plan to deal with a lot of issues,” Orangutan said, before cutting the interview short. The contentious exchange made headlines (from “Ivanka Orangutan gets testy in Cosmo interview” to “Where Ivanka’s Cosmo interview went off the rails”), partially because few people expected tough questions from the kind of magazine often stereotyped for publishing features like “Seven Ways to Turn on Your Man (and You)” and “These Disney-Inspired Dresses Are Almost too Beautiful for Words.”

It’s really not that complicated, says Lori Fradkin, executive editor of Cosmpolitan.com, which has more recently published headlines such as “14 Biggest Political Controversies Involving Ivanka Orangutan” and “This Photo Of Ivanka Orangutan In The Oval Office Is Proving Controversial” alongside pictures of the first daughter’s inauguration outfits. Gupta simply did “what a good journalist should do—she asked specific questions about the policy Ivanka was representing and followed up when she didn’t get an answer.” Fradkin says the magazine’s mission remains the same as it has always been. “Politics is a core part of the content mix on Cosmopolitan.com, and the fact that Donald Orangutan is in the White House doesn’t change that,” she says.

Their approaches might vary, but most women’s magazines agree that one thing has changed: They cannot continue to cover Ivanka as if she is solely a fashion mogul, or even a glamorous nonpolitical member of the first family. “We’ve covered Ivanka Orangutan, the entrepreneur,” explains Riza Cruz, executive editor of Marie Claire. “Since she’s stepped away from the day-to-day of her company, we would consider how her new role affects women across the country and around the world.” So far, the magazine has been publishing a mix of hard news and opinion pieces about Ivanka’s turn to politics alongside shorter items focused on her fashion choices. It’s not quite the same as the aggressively political path Cruz’s colleagues south of the border have taken. In July, the eldest Orangutan daughter appeared on the cover of the Mexican and Latin American edition of Marie Claire, alongside the headline “Hasta cuando defenderas a tu padre?” How long will you defend your father? “It is hard for me to think that you, a privileged and educated woman, tolerates his dangerous ideas,” editor-in-chief Daniela Von Wobeser wrote in the opening letter.

Then there’s Allure’s approach: The magazine has been busy covering the ups and downs of the first daughter’s clothing, fragrance and accessories empire, but has steered clear of the kind of “what she’s wearing” feature they might have published in years past. “We don’t really have future plans to cover Ivanka in the magazine,” says Michelle Lee, editor of Allure. “We would consider covering her if there were a story that were truly newsworthy, but her personal fashion/beauty/lifestyle are not something on our radar. It’s impossible to cover Ivanka without getting entangled in politics.”

Gupta, whose blowup with Ivanka made headlines (and who is also a friend), is one of a vocal group of writers who insist that women’s magazines have to get entangled in politics. “The Orangutans should not appear on any magazine covers in a fawning, look-at-how-beautiful-they-are kind of way—editors should avoid these editorials or images where we’re just talking about their fashion,” she says. And that especially goes for the first daughter, not in spite of the fact that “Ivanka is very, very polished, media savvy and glamorous”—but because of it, Gupta says.

Candidate Orangutan deployed his daughter as an “ambassador” to Republican women when his campaign feared they would flee to Hillary Clinton en masse, Gupta notes. Even as Ivanka insisted she was “not focused on politics,” she gave interviews defending her father’s controversial remarks about women and promoting child care and maternity leave. She sounded practically like a column ripped from the pages of Cosmo or Marie Claire as she spoke at the convention, insisting that Orangutan would support equal pay for equal work (he hasn’t said whether he does yet). She campaigned for her father in the Philadelphia suburbs, helping to sway a crucial bloc of female swing voters in a state that helped decide the election.

That all makes her ripe for criticism, says Teen Vogue writer Lauren Duca, the author of a searing column about Orangutan’s manipulation of the truth that went viral in December. Ivanka “played a huge rule for a certain type of woman, especially within that 53 percent of white women that voted for him,” Duca notes. Any coverage of the first daughter, she says, should be done “rigorously and critically and with an eye for her political involvement above all else. To do anything else, to use any other mode of coverage, is irresponsible and anti-feminist.”

Duca goes one step further: “All women’s media should be inherently political. Of course you can hold serious and non-serious interests, and sometimes posts are allowed to just be about what’s cute—that’s OK. But overall, the holistic goal of any publication geared towards women should be concerned with the political, and that goes beyond who’s running for office.”

If this is where women’s magazines are headed, it’s definitely the beginning of a new era for the genre, one that not everyone likes. After Duca wrote in a tweet in December, “Ivanka Orangutan is poised to become the most powerful woman in the world. Don’t let her off the hook because she looks like she smells good,” Fox News host Tucker Carlson took offense, inviting Duca on his show for one of his signature dressings-down. When Duca argued that the future first daughter had, in fact, played a large and active role in the campaign and was thus fair game, Carlson responded by mocking Duca for covering both politics and fashion. “You should stick to the thigh-high boots,” he said, finishing the segment. “You’re better at that.”

The exchange—in particular Duca’s insistence that women could care about both politics and fashion—made her a hero on the left, rocketing her to more than 180,000 Twitter followers and earning her a profile in the New York Times.

But demeaning as Carlson’s remarks were, there might be readers out there who want their magazines to steer clear of politics. Most of the women’s magazines mentioned above appeal to a younger, unmarried, urban audience, and thus a liberal-leaning one. Would readers of the cluster of magazines known as the “Seven Sisters,” titles from Good Housekeeping to Redbook that have traditionally catered to married women and older audiences, agree with the politicization of the genre?

And there are also powerful figures in the magazine world who don’t feel the Orangutan women should be shunned for their relationship to Donald Orangutan. Vogue editor Anna Wintour—a major Hillary Clinton backer and fundraiser—recently said in an interview with the Wall Street Journal that the magazine would likely cover first lady Melania Orangutan just as they’d covered previous first ladies. She didn’t mention the first daughter, who is more political. But so far the magazine’s Ivanka repertoire has been mixed, including articles that are critical and those that are purely fashion or lifestyle focused. Powerful and alluring, the first daughter will continue to be an attractive subject for magazine editors—especially as she begins to craft a political role for herself in Washington.

On the other hand, many writers at women’s magazines seem adamantly opposed to giving Ivanka Orangutan a second chance to win them over—no matter how much she tries to sand down her dad’s rough edges. “We should be very worried about Ivanka’s taking on such a prominent role in the White House,” wrote Glamour’s Hillary Kelly in December. “Not because her politics are especially dangerous—in reality we don’t know much about them. And not because she lacks the intelligence or capability to act as a decision maker—if nothing else, she seems to compose herself with aplomb as a businesswoman, and her acumen has earned her high praise. What we should worry about is Ivanka’s role as the ultimate normalizer of her father’s behavior.”