Ella Emhoff: Fashion’s midwit girl

Culture's gatekeepers have lost confidence in themselves.

She may have wept grotesquely on election night—at that sad scene outside Howard University where her stepmother, Kamala Harris, didn’t even bother to show up to her own watch party—but the Brooklyn trust fund tyke and fashion’s toast to sycophancy, Ella Emhoff, is going to be just fine.

In fact, she’s already back on the ’gram, giving vibes, usually in the form of a dirty mirror selfie with her depressing and tasteless apartment as backdrop—a domicile that’s a fitting extension of her own pampered mediocrity.

But, if you’re the child of a famous Democrat, especially the Joy and Coconuts lady, well, the sky’s the limit. Little Emhoff is going to be a famous fashion designer and America’s cultural institutions are on board, no resume required.

(Like that time, in 2011, when Chelsea Clinton said, I think I’ll be a journalist, and NBC News tripped over itself to slam a $600,000 a year contract in front of her. During Clinton’s three years with the network, she produced exactly three reports: one about a diner in New Mexico that helped kids with their homework; another about a gym in Detroit that helped kids work out; a third about poetry class for kids in Arkansas).

Totally by coincidence and sheer talent, in January 2021, the month her stepmom became Vice President, Emhoff was signed to the prestigious IMG modeling agency. She received fawning style section profiles from the likes of CNN, the BBC, and The New York Times.

On Inauguration Day 2021, Vogue—the once great fashion bible that’s now some kind of Netflix remake/Temu knockoff of its former self—drooled that Emhoff’s style "perfectly married her signature Brooklyn quirk with the solemnity of the occasion." That day, the South China Morning Post, of all places, reported: “Ella Emhoff outshone even Michelle Obama and Lady Gaga at the 2021 US presidential inauguration.”

Image: https://x.com/ArynneWexler/status/1874096975991496764

By 2023, Emhoff was invited to present her wares at New York’s Fashion Week, where she also walked the runway for Coach, and entered a partnership with Prada.

That would be all fine and well were she some unshakeable prodigy with skill beyond who-my-daddy-married. But she is, decidedly, not. And this isn’t just gripes from an old fuddy-duddy. The fact is, lovely and inspired Gen Z fashion is happening today. Only a few years ago, a look of nihilism dominated the streets of North Brooklyn, where the nation’s young tastemakers congregate. Today, plenty of the younger generation lollygag about in rather smart and fun getup, demonstrating a quite sophisticated sense of contrast and innuendo. It’s fantastic, and nowhere to be found in the pages of Vogue.

Doug’s trust fund kid is, decidedly, not one of those people. I should know; I’m basically her neighbor and I see it with my own eyes. When her look isn’t painfully juvenile, it’s lazy and arrogant. Even compared to her own Bushwick contemporaries, the California transplant has a midwit’s eye for the interesting and provocative. She’s utterly dull and half-baked.

At 25 years old, nothing more is expected of her. As a self-proclaimed model/designer/artist/knitter, only “DJ” is missing from her professional repertoire. Emhoff is going through the spitball, check out my new podcast, exploratory stage of life. There’s nothing wrong with that, it’s normal and healthy, except that the nation’s style gatekeepers try to pretend otherwise.

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It must run in the family. Her shallow and unremarkable stepmother was manufactured into prominence, too. Kamala, for her part, appeared twice on the cover of Vogue. The first time, February 2021, generated controversy, but for all the wrong reasons.

Looking stupid in her Chuck Taylors, Kamala posed before a backdrop of sloppily draped green and pink fabric. Eagle-eyed white liberals called it racist. Why? Because pink and green are the colors of watermelon, of course, and there’s some trope about black people liking watermelon.

(Who thinks like that? White liberals, that’s who.)

(Note: the watermelon stereotype only applies to slave-descended black Americans which, as an Indian/Jamaican via Canada, Kamala is not, making the whole accusation of racist curtains, itself racist. But never mind that).

This isn’t really about Ella Emhoff and her contrived rusticism, dumb-ass Harry Potter glasses, and Etsy-grade knitwear. It’s about Anna Wintour, Vogue’s chilling editor, who received the Presidential Medal of Freedom last week alongside Satan’s legion of Hillary Clinton and George Soros.

(Jill Biden, America’s worst dressed woman who grasps for validation wherever she goes, got two Vogue covers as First Lady. But that probably had nothing to do with her husband awarding Wintour the nation’s highest civilian honor).

Instead, this is about an industry Wintour destroyed so thoroughly that it now filters its scions through—of all nasty and uninspiring places—the Democrat Party. Emhoff’s flash in the spotlight just happens to be a great example. No one thinks she looks that great, but if you work in fashion, you’d better squint hard enough until you do.

Political brain rot in our cultural institutions is easy to blame. And while that remains a factor, something else seems to be going on. Somewhere along the line, our gatekeepers began to feel ashamed of their position, lost confidence in themselves, and became afraid of the underlings who marched into supporting roles with degrees in social justice. They lost their balls and, more importantly, they got addicted to approval from those in power. Wintour, singlehandedly, oversaw fashion’s demise into a banal corporate artifact that now looks to Washington, D.C. (yuck!) for inspiration.

(Save, of course, for Vogue et al.’s supernova-sized blind spot when it comes to covering Melania Trump).

Fashion editors ought to be irreverent, discerning, searing bitches. But, as Wintour proves, even that role gets tiresome. Eventually you just give in and collect.