Selling Melania Trump, One NFT at a Time
The New York Times
A year after leaving the White House, the former first lady tests the water for her brand.
On Jan. 11, not quite a year after Donald and Melania Trump left the White House and less than a week after the anniversary of the attack on the Capitol that took place in his name, four years or so after putting her trademarks on ice and shuttering her QVC jewelry line and her skin-care line, Melania Trump returned to the public eye with a new kind of personal brand and a new kind of merch to go with.
The vehicle: a 14-day auction on melaniatrump.com of three pieces that comprise what is called the Head of State Collection.
The name is presumably a wink-wink-nudge-nudge reference to the star lot: what the website describes as an “iconic broad-brimmed, one-of-a-kind hat” originally worn by Mrs. Trump in 2018 during the state visit of the French president, Emmanuel Macron, and his wife, Brigitte, and signed by Mrs. Trump. (Also on the block: a 2021 watercolor by the French artist Marc-Antoine Coulon of Mrs. Trump in said hat, signed by the artist and subject, and a nonfungible token, or NFT, of the artwork.) The opening bid was set at approximately $250,000 for the group.
