Jennifer Hegseth wore a $42 Shein dress to last weekend’s White House Correspondents’ Association dinner in Washington, D.C., and the look quickly became a social media talking point. Parsons student Ella Devi first drew attention to the one-shoulder dress in a post that wrongly said Pete Hegseth’s wife had worn a $20 Temu dress.
Devi later said a reverse image search led her to misidentify the dress as one from Temu. She said in an interview Tuesday that she has worked in fashion since she was about 13, has worked at six editions of New York Fashion Week and interned at LaQuan Smith for nearly 18 months. She also said, “I talk a lot [on ‘X’] about the sartorial [fashion] choices of right-wing women.”
The post landed in a corner of online fashion commentary where political figures are increasingly judged not just by what they say, but by what they wear. Fast fashion has long stirred debate over overconsumption, environmentalism and copycat designs, and this one was no different: Temu reportedly trended on X Monday as the dress debate spread.
Jennifer Hegseth, who posted a photo of herself in the dress with her husband on Instagram, had more than 7,000 likes on Tuesday. The attention also underscored the public profile of Pete Hegseth, the U.S. secretary of war and a former longtime executive and producer, whose family life has become part of the social-media conversation around him. Devi said some senior people in fashion have pushed back on her posts, but she added, “That was smaller scale but my feet will land on the ground just fine. And I’ll keep posting.”
The dress itself turned out not to be a Temu find, but the speed of the misidentification mattered more than the correction. By Tuesday, the episode had already shown how quickly a single post can turn a dinner outfit into a wider argument about politics, status and the fast-fashion labels people project onto both.
