How out of touch....

Melania's stiletto sideshow

As the first lady departed to see storm fallout in Texas, Twitter erupted with critiques of her shoe choice.

By ANNIE KARNI

Melania Trump, the former model and reluctant first lady, often lets her fashion choices do the talking for her.

Since her belated move into the White House in June, Melania Trump hasn’t yet announced an issue, or even an area of interest, for which she plans to advocate from her powerful platform. She has made few public speeches or statements, beyond introductions at campaign rallies she attends with her husband. But she’s dutifully stepped into the silent role of enhancing her husband by appearing impeccably and appropriately dressed by his side.

“Classy and conservative,” were the reviews from the local Saudi Arabian press after the first lady landed in Riyadh last spring dressed in a black, belted jumpsuit. The deep red Christian Dior “bar suit” she wore to visit Paris for Bastille Day in July was deemed to be a culturally appropriate choice highlighting an icon of French fashion.

But on Tuesday, she appeared to put the wrong foot forward when she boarded Marine One, en route to visit emergency responders in hurricane-ravaged Texas, wearing towering black snakeskin stilettos.

The emblematic first image of the first lady heading off to visit a hurricane in heels — a moment that the president has seized on as an opportunity to project strength and show off decisive leadership — instead became another symbol of a White House that can often seem out of touch.

Lisa Kline, who worked as a stylist to vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin during the 2008 election, said in an interview she thought “it was a mistake in the message it relays. A lot of eyes were on them. They’re going to a devastated area. She should be dressed accordingly.”

The heels at least temporarily stole the spotlight from a gloomy president who aides said has been buoyed by what he sees, so far, as an effective coordinated response to a record-breaking storm.

“Tan suit looks pretty good today, doesn’t it?” Valerie Jarrett, a former top adviser to President Barack Obama, tweeted, referring to the Republican outcry over Obama’s summer look to discuss serious national security issues at a news conference in 2014.

Former first lady Michelle Obama also created her own fashion scandal in 2009, when she wore a pair of $540 Lanvin sneakers to volunteer at a food bank in Washington.

“Small gestures send big messages,” journalist Jamil Smith wrote on Twitter, regarding the first lady’s shoe choice. “It isn’t that they keep getting it wrong. They don’t care about getting it right.”

On board Air Force One to Corpus Christi, as the picture of the delicate heels ricocheted across the Internet, Melania Trump changed into a pair of bright, white sneakers, which looked fresh out of the box.

She wasn’t the only female member of the Trump delegation wearing footwear that raised eyebrows — two other women were spotted on Air Force One wearing pumps and suede heels.

The debate over the first lady’s shoes wasn’t an isolated fashion faux pas for the women who act as the face of the Trump administration.

A week after her father’s inauguration in January, Ivanka Trump posted a picture of herself wearing a $5,000 silver Carolina Herrera gown — the same night protests erupted at airports across the country over Trump’s executive order banning refugees from majority-Muslim countries from entering the United States.

People close to the first daughter said at the time she felt “terrible” about the dissonance between the image projected from her Kalorama mansion and the painful photographs of refugees being detained at international airports. But the picture still lives on her public Instagram account, where it has been applauded with more than 266,000 “likes.”

Louise Linton, the wife of Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, seemed to relish her distance from the average, middle-class American woman when she posted a Jackie O.-inspired snap of herself on Instagram, while accompanying her husband on a “day trip” to Kentucky earlier this month aboard a government plane. In the photo, Linton tagged all of the designer labels she was sporting, including her Hermes scarf and her Valentino rockstud heels.

She then lashed out with snide vitriol at a mother of three from Oregon who expressed distaste at her public post. An apology came later, via a crisis-managing publicist, in which Linton called the post and her comments “highly insensitive.”

There was no acknowledgment from the White House that the first lady’s storm attire was at all off-key. Instead, her staff blamed the media for creating a “sad” side circus to an otherwise somber day.

“It’s sad that we have an active and ongoing natural disaster in Texas,” said Stephanie Grisham, a spokeswoman for the first lady, “and people are worried about her shoes.”

Later Tuesday, the first lady’s office released a statement on the storm. “I want to be able to offer my help and support in the most productive way possible, not through just words, but also action,” the first lady said. “What I found to be the most profound during the visit was not only the strength and resilience of the people of Texas, but the compassion and sense of community that has taken over the state. My thoughts and prayers continue to be with the people of Texas and Louisiana.”