The Ball Gowns of Trump’s New ‘Golden Age’

What does the new “golden age,” the one President Donald J. Trump declared again and again in his inaugural speeches was about to dawn, look like?

For a preview, cast your eye to the trio of official inaugural balls held on Monday night. They were the real-life equivalent of a trailer for a remake of “The Gilded Age”: a series of champagne celebrations in which the main characters took center stage in glittering costumes that called to mind eras gone by to create a pastiche of aspiration. One set to the tune of Frank Sinatra’s “My Way.”

If members of the Trump and Vance families weren’t exactly wearing 24-karat frocks, they were at least wearing jewel tones.

Melania Trump, for example, offered a modern update to the classic column, courtesy of a collaboration with Hervé Pierre, the designer and stylist with whom she has worked since the first Trump inauguration, and whose dress this time bore a notable resemblance to her 2017 gown.

For Trump 1.0, she wore an off-the-shoulder white gazar dress of his design with a single ruffle tracing a curve down her body. For 2.0, it was a strapless, pearl-toned, crepe dress with a black ribbon tracing an Art Deco squiggle down her body — along with a very turn-of-the-century black choker affixed with a diamond pin. As a whole, it elegantly called to mind the Parthenon, Erté and a question mark, all at once.

Ivanka Trump, also in black and white, channeled Audrey Hepburn in the 1954 cinematic love story “Sabrina.” Her dress was courtesy of Givenchy, the fashion house owned by LVMH, whose chief executive, Bernard Arnault, was at the inauguration (and who was for a period last year the richest man in the world).

Givenchy remade for Ms. Trump the famous white sleeveless organdy ball gown with black embroidery that Hepburn wore in the movie, complete with a floating bustlelike overskirt. She wore it with opera-length black gloves, suggesting that when it comes to fashion, life really can imitate art. (And that Ms. Trump, like so many, is a Hepburn fan, especially when it comes to style.) She looked lovely, in a cosplay kind of way.

And speaking of bustles, there was another one on Lara Trump’s strapless carnelian gown, which matched the gems at her neck. There were more happy endings embedded in the sapphire beads of Usha Vance’s mermaidlike Reem Acra look (adapted from one currently in the designer’s collection) and the elaborately embroidered princess bodice of Tiffany Trump’s diaphanous frock.

Still, no one outsparkled Kai Trump, Donald Trump Jr.’s 17-year-old daughter, who accompanied her father and gleefully posted on Instagram about her silvery crystal-covered Sherri Hill number, with a cutout at the bodice and midthigh slit.

In other words, when the extended Trump family took to the stage at the Liberty Ball (where Billy Ray Cyrus put in an appearance in non-dress-code denim and a cowboy hat with a multicolored scarf draped around his neck), they offered crib notes for a sartorial tour through the iconography of celluloid Americana — the silver screen, Disney, Vegas, the robber barons — filtered through a reality-TV lens.

A little taste of the … well, taste that will define the next four years. So bedazzled that for the moment, no one talked about the festering divides and discontent that brought the first Gilded Age to an end.