Lynn Yaeger, writing at Vogue.com, Aug. 29, 2017:

This morning, Mrs. Trump boarded Air Force One wearing a pair of towering pointy-toed snakeskin heels better suited to a shopping afternoon on Madison Avenue or a girls’ luncheon at La Grenouille.

While the nation is riveted by images of thousands of Texans wading with their possessions, their pets, their kids, in chest-high water, desperately seeking refuge; while a government official recommend that those who insist on sheltering in place write their names and social security numbers on their arms, Melania Trump is heading to visit them in footwear that is a challenge to walk in on dry land. ...

What kind of message does a fly-in visit from a First Lady in sky-high stilettos send to those suffering the enormous hardship, the devastation of this natural disaster? And why, oh why, can’t this administration get anything, even a pair of shoes, right?

Lynn Yaeger, writing at the Village Voice, Feb. 27, 2007: The country may be ready for a woman in high office, but can we shed its lurid fascination with the details of her wardrobe? . . .

The problem, in a nutshell, is this: Unlike their male counterparts, women politicians have no single way that they are expected to dress. Whatever you do, you’re wrong: You’re either too sexy or too dowdy; too soignée or too sloppy. The apparently irresistible desire to savage women transcends party and even international lines: Condi Rice’s butchy boots and her shopping trip to Ferragamo on Fifth Avenue (OK, so it was only a few days after Hurricane Katrina) were widely excoriated; Ségoléne Royal, the Socialist candidate for the presidency of France (if she wins, she’ll be that country’s first female head of state) was hammered for traipsing around the slums of Chile in spike heels . . .