To the snobby fashion designers refusing to dress Melania Trump – she doesn't need your freebies

If there is any group of creatives more pompous, vainglorious and silly than couture fashion designers, I would dearly love to know who they are.

The recent outpouring from pained dressmakers such as Tom Ford and Marc Jacobs about their reluctance to endow the forthcoming First Lady, Melania Trump, with free samples of their collections has reached a hauteur that pop stars, Premier League managers and members of the British Royal Family can only dream of. One can almost see Sophie Theallet (who has dressed Michelle Obama for eight years), stamp a petite foot while issuing the following press release: “I will not participate in dressing or associating in any way with the next First Lady.”

So hoorah for that Gallic scamp Jean Paul Gaultier, the man who put cones on Madonna and sex into everything. He reflected on this issue at the British Fashion Awards yesterday with his typical insouciance, saying, “If she asked me to dress her, why not?” Chapeau! He also pointed out that at 46 years of age, Melania Trump is also quite good at doing up buttons and invisible zips unaided. “She dresses very well by herself.”

Indeed, the wild thing about Melania Trump is that she’s not so grand that she is above buying her own clothes, and, er, putting them on her body. Like many other adults do on a regular basis.

Chaps, the hard news here is that Melania doesn’t need your freebies: she’s married to a billionaire! She turned up on election day in a jumpsuit that she had bought with ready money! Her entire time on the campaign trail was achieved in clothes she had craftily managed to acquire via a similar mercantile exchange.

Melania Trump, who from all accounts came from a pretty humble start in Slovenia, and started out in the US as a model, presumably knows what she likes and isn’t going to hang out for a freebie. Her style might not please the White House fashionistas who drone on endlessly about the “iconic” (basically twinsetty and yawningly dull) fashion sense of Jackie Kennedy or the way Michelle Obama channelled that radical “piece”, known to us mere mortals as a cardigan. Melania clearly likes her own look, and she seems pretty happy in it.

She’s not about to start genuflecting at the throne of the magnificent Marc Jacobs, who is clearly under some sort of bonkers illusion that if he starts lending the First Lady dresses, or maybe a coat, out will go the global flame of political dissent and discourse.

“I’d rather put my energy into helping those who will be hurt by Trump and his supporters,” says Jacobs. Well, why don’t you put your energy into making some affordable clothes that everyone can wear, deary? Or go and put your energy into closing down the appalling sweatshops harnessed by the fashion trade? Perhaps Jacobs and his peers do all of that already – perhaps not.

But I’m afraid that what comes out of all their bleating is not so much a noble political stance as much as a flustered anxiety about the potential tarnishing of their brand by someone who, in their view, is not particularly pukka.

Putting up a wall around your clothes in the hope that the new FLOTUS can’t touch them, my darlings, is as grimly divisive as anything her husband might think about saying.