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Ivanka Trump Is Closing Down Her Fashion Brand

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Ivanka Trump is shutting down her namesake retail business, a whopping 17 months after starting her work at the White House as a senior adviser to her father, the president of the United States. The Wall Street Journal reports that the company’s 18 employees have been informed that it will be closing and that Ivanka will address them later today. “Ms. Trump had contemplated the move in recent months,” the article says, “as she grew frustrated by the restrictions she placed on the company, IT Collection LLC, to avoid possible conflicts of interest while serving in the White House.”

Trump’s brand sells moderately priced (and frequently floral) wardrobe basics, shoes, handbags, and jewelry, and her website also hosts a blog that covers such She-EO–adjacent topics as “How to Create an Inclusive Work Culture” (maybe don’t refer to certain types of people as animals or employ men accused of abusing multiple partners?). Having cultivated a reputation for herself as a model for working American women long before entering the administration—Ivanka Trump HQ launched a Women Who Work campaign in 2014—there is a clear overlap between the issues Trump has focused on in her White House work and the lifestyle her brand, in which she still has a vested financial interest, purports to offer.

But Trump has heretofore been seemingly unbothered about such conflicts of interest; she has continued to wear her sheath dresses and pumps from her own label to events she attends as a White House employee, even after watchdog group Democracy Forward sent a letter to the Office of Government Ethics in January demanding an investigation into her using her public position for private financial gain. As recently as this past May, she was awarded seven new trademarks from the Chinese government around the same time her father, Donald Trump, vowed to help ZTE, a behemoth Chinese telecommunications company. And there was the meeting she took way back in 2016, about one week after the election, with her father and Japan’s prime minister Shinzo Abe at Trump Tower. Shortly after, it was reported that Ivanka’s company was about to close a deal with apparel company Sanei International, owned in part by the Japanese government—that agreement subsequently disintegrated.

Now Read: Supermodel Karlie Kloss Has Announced Her Engagement

This article first appeared on Vogue.com

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