Sables and Minks and Chinchillas Galore: Ivana Trump’s Opulent Style
“Ivana Trump’s look wasn’t for everyone,” the designer Dennis Basso said Thursday afternoon, a few hours after Ms. Trump’s death was announced by former President Donald J. Trump, her ex-husband, in a statement posted on his social networking platform, Truth Social.
But it was, for the decade in which she and Mr. Trump first made their public mark, the epitome of a certain go-go 1980s New York style. One caught by Tom Wolfe’s “The Bonfire of the Vanities” and defined by chinchilla stoles, leopard-print shirtdresses, and Upper East Side ready-fitted trousers in soft colors. One in which your limo could never stretch too long, your hair and shoulder pads could never be too big, or your furs too fabulous.
And for nearly 40 years, even as styles changed drastically, Ms. Trump and Mr. Basso remained as two of the most consistent proponents of that paradigm.
Mr. Basso, 68, said he first met Ms. Trump in September 1983, when she came to his debut show at the Regency hotel on the Upper East Side of Manhattan.
She sat in the front row of his show that day near Joan Collins, another diva of the decade, then came backstage. “She said with that fantastic accent: ‘Dahling, I really don’t know you. But we’re going to be friends,’” Mr. Basso recalled. “I thought: ‘Oh, my God. Like, how could this be?’”
Trump Tower had recently opened near Bergdorf Goodman. Not everyone was enamored of the couple inhabiting the triplex at the top, but it was hard to argue that they did not perfectly capture the “greed is good” ethos of the era.
The day after Mr. Basso’s debut show, Ms. Trump materialized in his Seventh Avenue showroom and marveled at the size. “It’s smaller than my dressing room closet” was how she put it, Mr. Basso recalled.
But by the time she left, he had an order for seven magnificent fur pieces.
“One was a pale silver silk shantung maxi-coat lined in deep, deep sheared magenta fur,” Mr. Basso said. “She bought a chinchilla coat, a sable jacket, a big cashmere evening wrap. Remember the year! If you said you bought that now, it would be, like, ‘Have you lost your mind?’ But it was the height of all that glamour. Everybody was on that bandwagon.”