J.D. Vance and his wife, Osha Vance, discuss her $8.75 Old Navy dress
US Vice President J.D. Vance used his wife’s maternity dress to score a political point about federal spending, after US Second Lady Osha Vance mocked a New York Times article analyzing the “political symbolism” of her maternity wardrobe.In a post on X on Thursday, Vance shared a photo of a receipt showing his wife purchased a $50 Old Navy maternity dress for $8.75 and wrote: “America: Meet the next federal budget director!”
The comment came on the heels of Osha Vance’s criticism of New York Times fashion columnist Vanessa Friedman titled “The Politics and Power of the Pregnancy Image,” which examined how three prominent women in the Trump administration, the second lady, White House press secretary Carolyn Levitt, and Katie Miller, wife of Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, publicly displayed their pregnancies around the same time.Friedman argued that this pattern was intentional, writing that the women “created a remarkably consistent, and somewhat variable, image of the White House family and fertility platform.” She added that Osha Vance, by highlighting her pregnancy, was doing her job of humanizing the vice president.Osha Vance responded sharply to Friedman’s article: “Now that we know the political significance of her $8.75 coral maternity dress from Old Navy, I can’t wait to hear what the New York Times has to say about my stretch pants and compression stockings,” she wrote on the X, attaching the receipt.
J.D. Vance’s federal budget framed the exchange as a broader statement about fiscal constraints that fit well with the administration’s working-class economic messaging. With family costs remaining a major concern for American voters, seeing the vice president’s wife buying an $8 dress, instead of designer maternity clothes, reinforces the everyman image the administration was trying to cultivate.Ironically, J.D. Vance was one of the most vocal defenders of American manufacturing in the Trump administration, accusing previous administrations of deciding that “America would no longer be a manufacturing powerhouse” and allowing “the rest of the world to make the essential things we need for our homes and for our families.” Old Navy, which is owned by Gap Inc, manufactures the vast majority of its clothing overseas, primarily Vietnam, China, Bangladesh and India.
