#ella emhoff

Ella, 23

“I’m wearing Sandy Liang top and skirt with Gil Rodriguez tee under, Kiko Konstantinov x Hysteric Glamour x ASICS sneakers and Gucci purse. Currently, I’m tapping into how I wish I dressed as a little kid, mixing active wear (ie sneakers / camping slippers / track pants / fleeces) with more dainty and cutesy pieces like prairie dresses and big cotton frilly skirts. It was always a battle with my mom and me between wearing dresses and tracksuits.”

Marissa R. Moss at Rolling Stone:

In 2016, at what became an ill-fated celebration to hopefully usher in the first female president, there was not one country music performer at the Democratic National Convention. There were pop stars like Demi Lovato, Lenny Kravitz, and Lady Gaga, but there wasn’t a single performance that drew from the country or Americana worlds. This was a mistake, clearly: The attitude was that country music and Southern/rural stuff was for Trumpers, and to be avoided at all costs, and that doesn’t end well when you’re trying to win an election, or understand the American public at large on a level deeper than “red state bad.” There are blue voters in those red states, if you get them to the polls, but you have to speak — or sing — their language to get them there.  

The first night of the 2024 Democratic National Convention, wherein we’ll once again make a go for a female president, looked and sounded a whole lot different from eight years ago. There weren’t big pop-star performances (though surely they are coming), but there was country: a country artist, Mickey Guyton, and a country person, Jason Isbell, singing “Something More than Free” with his unmistakable Alabama drawl in front of an image of a barn with an American flag on it. These signifiers have been generally reserved for Trump rallies when it comes to the Venn diagram of music and recent politics, with country music’s conservative core latching on to the jingoist beat in earnest since 9/11, though the alliance between the two dates back far longer. 

By opening their convention with Isbell and Guyton, Kamala Harris and Tim Walz seem to want to change that, with the cherry on top appearing in the form of a Harris/Walz camouflage baseball hat released a few weeks ago — it sold out instantly. But it’s country artists like Jason Aldean, who appeared at the Republican National Convention and engages in the workingman’s sport of country club golf with former president Trump, who like to own this sort of symbolism. His 2019 album, 9, even contained a song called “Camouflage Hat.” That’s the genius work of this one small bit of Harris/Walz merch. The hat reclaims the rural and Southern identity that mainstream Democrats have long ignored, all in with the power of one nifty little cap. Ella Emhoff proudly wore hers last night, while Walz displayed his own — also camouflage — Jason Isbell hat backstage. 

Meanwhile, it’s the Trump supporters who are the ones getting country music wrong, soundtracking their TikTok videos in support of the ex-president with none other than The Chicks’ “Not Ready to Make Nice,” which was written after their expulsion from Nashville in the wake of anti-Iraq War comments and their refusal to apologize. This baffling phenomenon by the right seems to come from either an inability to Google, or an assumption that everything country music must be conservative, and it’s hard to decide which is worse. 

While politicians’ family members do not necessarily indicate the politician’s policies, I think this is an indicator of good things in the future WHEN Harris gets elected.

I’m going to try and refer to Kamala Harris as Harris, once established who I am talking about, from now on because we as a population call female politicians by first names and nicknames far more than we do to their male counterparts

Ella Emhoff by Dan Bassini for NYFW 2024 (New York, April 2024)