Ivanka Trump Details Her “Punk Phase” and Love for Nirvana in Her Mom’s New Memoir
Ivana Trump’s new memoir Raising Trump has presented the president’s first wife ample opportunity to make a few digs at her former husband and his current wife, Melania Trump—both in its pages and while out promoting the book. “She makes a half-hearted attempt at gossipmongering,” a recent Slate review notes, “and dutifully recounts the spectacular disintegration of her marriage.” Just last week, Ivana elicited the most heated emotions we’ve yet seen from first lady Melania after Ivana joked in an ABC interview that, as Trump’s first wife, she was “basically” first lady. (Which Melania then called “attention-seeking and self-serving noise.” By Melania standards, that’s a lot of outrage.)
For all that, this is still, you know, Ivana’s memoir. But her daughter Ivanka Trump—who some have remarked herself rivals the first lady—won’t entirely surrender the spotlight. Apparently, she hasn’t been too busy ignoring the wage gap to make time to get some writing done. Her mother grants her a few precious paragraphs, in which Ivanka details what she describes as her “punk phase,” a time of superficial rebellion in the ’90s involving hair dye and distressed corduroy. (Ivanka’s passages in her mother’s book are slightly less weird when one considers her birth name is, like her mother, Ivana, and Ivanka is just a nickname. Who’s to say which Trump gets the byline?)
“I was really into Nirvana. My wardrobe consisted of ripped corduroy jeans and flannel shirts,” Ivanka writes in Raising Trump. “One day after school, I dyed my hair blue.” Ivana, Ivanka reports, was none too impressed: “She took one look at me and immediately went out to the nearest drugstore to buy a $10 box of Nice’n Easy,” she continues.
As a brunette who has been advised repeatedly that lighter colors do not work on darker ones, I have my doubts about the efficacy of using blonde dye on blue, but alas, that’s not even the end of her tale, so it’s best not to stop and dwell for too long. This episode, it turns out, was actually the genesis of Ivanka’s now-trademark blonde. Ivana, it seems, purchased a shade that was several tones lighter than Ivanka’s natural color—“and I have never looked back!” she concludes.
(That is, except at the 2013 Metropolitan Museum of Art Costume Institute Gala for the exhibition “Punk: Chaos to Couture.” There, Ivanka matched hair streaked through with bright blue to the rest of her Juan-Carlos Obando-designed look, a kelly green pleated skirt with a thigh-high slit and a navy blue wrap top.)
That may have been the demise of the blue hair, but the punk phase stuck around through the death of Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain in 1994. “It was a shock and I was distraught. Mom had no idea who Kurt Cobain was, and she sympathized only so much,” Ivanka writes. (Never miss an opportunity to shade your mother in her own memoir.) “After twenty-four hours of my crying inconsolably in my room, alone—major melodrama—Mom had to pull me out of there to go down to dinner.” Heartless.
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