Kamala Harris’ stepdaughter gives the Biden administration its first fashion moment at Inauguration Day 2021
Ella Emhoff on Inauguration Day (photo: Instagram @miumiu)
Social media had a field day with Wednesday’s inauguration, and possibly hailed a new 2021 fashion icon: Ella Emhoff, the stepdaughter to Vice President Kamala Harris. Toting a current season Miu Miu coat through her speech, a Twitter frenzy ensued of people discovering the unique style of the previously little-known stepdaughter to Madame Vice President.
Her Prada look sent fashion journalists into a frenzy, diving into her social media and analyzing her overall aesthetic, such as the trendy Batsheva dress she chose to wear for the occasion. In the past few days she’s graced the pages of Vogue, where she concedes to hiring a stylist for her election outfit. There seemed to be divide among fashion pundits on whether she was indeed serving looks, some saying yes, others saying no, however, Fashion writer Emma Allwood perhaps described it best with a term she had previously coined “avant basic”
Emhoff is a fashion student at Parsons, evidenced by her Instagram, where she posts her knitwear and creative works. Unlike Vice President Harris’s sister, Maya, and niece, Meena, who have active roles on Harris’ campaign trail, Ella chooses for the most part to keep politics off of her profile - a space for her art as a budding designer. She may be intelligently following the footsteps of previous first children in the Obama family and of other presidents who kept relatively low profiles for their children; wherein an unspoken rule of media etiquette usually allowed them a degree of privacy,
But in 2021, with a Miuccia Prada coat, rocking Lotta Volkova Adidas, enticing social media virality, and with a glass ceiling breaking stepmother, the attention might be hard to avoid. It's clear there are going to be changes in this new presidency, but not in the presence of privileged youth in the fashion media world.