Some had come to New York with parents or chaperones in tow others were alone. While Elite’s official brochure stated that contestants were aged between 14 and 24, all of those the Guardian has spoken to, competing in both years, were aged between 14 and 19. “This wasn’t being judged or part of the competition – it was for their entertainment.” “I knew in my gut it wasn’t right,” she recalls. She says an organiser told her that if she refused, she would be excluded from the competition.

Photograph: Nina Berman/NOORĪnother contestant, who was 15 at the time, also remembers being asked to walk for Trump, Casablancas and other men on the boat in September 1992. I didn’t dance – I blew a kiss at them, spun around and walked away.”Ĭontestants wait to board the Spirit of New York yacht, September 1991. And she said, ‘No, you look great, take off your blazer and go and do it.’ So I walked down the stairs. “I said to her, ‘I don’t see why me going down the stairs and dancing in front of those two has anything to do with me becoming a model. “A woman at the agency was pushing me,” she recalls. Lee, an introverted teenager who loved to draw but hated school, was in New York for the first time. She recalls how the contestants were encouraged to parade downstairs, one by one, and dance for Trump, Casablancas and others. One of the girls on the boat was Shawna Lee, then a 14-year-old from a small town outside Toronto. On a similarly golden evening in early September that year, another group of contestants boarded the Spirit of New York, chartered for another Elite cruise. In 1992, Trump hosted the competition again. In 1991, he was a headline sponsor, throwing open the Plaza, his lavish, chateau-style hotel overlooking Central Park, transforming it into the main venue and accommodating the young models. Trump was closely involved in Casablancas’s competition. At stake was a life-changing prize: a $150,000 contract with the world’s then leading modelling agency, Elite Model Management, run by John Casablancas. They had travelled from around the world to compete in Elite’s Look of the Year competition, an annual event that had been running since 1983 and was already credited with launching the careers of Cindy Crawford, Helena Christensen and Stephanie Seymour.

They must just be acting presidential.The party aboard the Spirit of New York was one of several events that Donald Trump, then 45, attended with a group of 58 aspiring young models that September.

Hardly the boost to middle-income families.īut of course, who can blame commenters for ignoring all that in favor of Ivanka’s visible nipples? Donald Trump is notoriously obsessed with women’s boobs and bodies. 'The bottom line on this budget is that it's a right-wing fantasy document that paves the way for a hyper-partisan process on tax reform and trillions of dollars in handouts to big corporations and the wealthy,' said Oregon Senator Ron Wyden. The plan calls for '$473 billion in cuts from Medicare over 10 years,” while giving wealthy individuals and corporations tax breaks. Donald Trump has boasted that his plan would be “the biggest tax cut in U.S. So now we have to sit here and make the point that it does not matter whether the First Daughter's nipples are showing it matters whether she should be charged for felony fraud for giving inflated numbers to potential condo buyers.Īnyway, because we can and should understand what Ivanka is doing regardless of her nipples, here's what she talked about at the town hall: She reportedly called tax reform a top priority of her father’s administration, saying that they are putting a “priority on middle-income American families.” However, protesters at the event argued social services like Medicare would be hit under Trump’s proposed tax plan. And, boy, are there plenty of things you could reasonably criticize Ivanka for. One of the problems with sexism is that it’s often impossible to extricate its influence from all the other, reasonable criticisms one might throw at a woman. And yet men tend to act like gross children whenever they see them on a woman. Sometimes they get pointy when it’s cold, or are just pointy all the time, and they're one of the the least interesting things about anyone. The thing about nipples is: Who cares about nipples? Most people have nipples.

Ivanka trump teenage modeling runway