
The best and worst dressed stars at Les Misérables' opening night... from Melania Trump to Usha Vance
A slew of famous faces and political figures descended upon the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., on Wednesday evening for the opening night of Les Misérables.
The star-studded guest list certainly did not disappoint, with President Donald Trump and his wife, Melania Trump, Vice President JD Vance and his spouse, Usha Vance, and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and his partner, Cheryl Hines, all gathering to watch the iconic musical.
Many of them did not disappoint with their looks, turning heads on the red carpet with glamorous dresses or handsome tuxedos.
Some, however, completely missed the mark with their ensembles, arriving in eyebrow-raising outfits.
From bizarre feathers to frumpy frocks, the event was filled with both fashion wins and sartorial nightmares.
Donald, 78, kept it classy as he opted for a simple, black tuxedo as he arrived holding hands with Melania.
The First Lady, 55, for her part, donned a $3,900 black Bottega Veneta dress that contained a conservative neckline and gold embellishments on her hip and shoulders.
She exuded elegance and glamour in the chic gown, which she paired with silver and bronze striped Christian Louboutin heels, which usually sell for around $1,000.
Vice President JD Vance also wore a tuxedo but in a navy blue. As for his wife, Usha Vance, she opted for a $635 Shoshanna strapless dark blue gown that contained a white stripe that went around her midriff area and down the skirt. Toned-down yet stylish, the two's coordinating colors complimented one another
Fashion designer Pamella Roland DeVos and her businessman husband Daniel DeVos were also in attendance. She donned a fiery red gown that contained dramatic shoulder embellishments and had long pieces of fabric that hung to the ground. Daniel, on the other hand, kept it simple in a black suit
Donald's Vice President JD, 40, matched Donald as he also wore a tuxedo but in navy blue.
As for his wife, she opted for a $635 Shoshanna strapless dark blue gown that contained a white stripe that went around her midriff area and down the skirt.
Toned-down yet stylish, the two's coordinating colors complimented one another.
Health Secretary Robert, 71, wore a similar blue tuxedo, however, his white button-down shirt underneath contained piercing black stripes.
Actress Cheryl, 59, donned a $298 Mac Duggal black midi dress. The strapless number contained an eye-popping feathered fringe at the bottom of the skirt.
Fashion designer Pamella Roland DeVos and her businessman husband Daniel DeVos were also in attendance.
She arrived in a fiery red gown that contained dramatic shoulder embellishments and had long pieces of fabric that hung to the ground.
Daniel, on the other hand, kept it effortless in a black suit.
Donald and Melania's appearance at the play brought some controversy with it, as it was reported that some of the play's cast members were boycotting.
When asked about it outside the event, Donald stated defiantly, 'I couldn't care less. Honestly, I couldn't. All I do is run the country well.'
When the Trumps entered the theater, there were cheers and applause and a USA chant - and also some boos.
It comes after Donald announced that he would be firing the board of the Kennedy Center - named for the late Democratic president - and naming himself chairman.
Hashtags

Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles


The Sun
17 minutes ago
- The Sun
Scott Wolf's ex Kelley screams ‘shame on you!' as police detain her for ‘erratic behavior' days after his divorce filing
THE estranged wife of actor Scott Wolf has posted a video of her being detained by police after making concerning comments. Utah police exclusively told The U.S. Sun that officers responded to a call at Scott and Kelley Wolf's Park City home for concerns over a woman's "erratic behavior" and a "potential threat to herself and others." 6 6 6 6 In the video posted to Kelley's Instagram account, Kelley screamed "shame on you!" as officers put her in handcuffs days after Scott filed for divorce. Police told Kelley, 48, that they were confronting her because she "made some comments to your dad and comments to people that are concerning," so they "want to make sure you're okay." "Oh my God. Don't. Oh my God, this is not happening!" Kelley is heard screaming back at them in a video posted on Friday morning. "This is shameful. Look at this... Be ashamed of yourself." Cops could be heard assuring her that she wasn't going to jail and that they were going to get her "some help." "I know what I'm doing, I've done this. This is my job," Kelley responded. The video was all black and only audio until the last few seconds, when Kelley and officers appear on the screen. "Officers responded to a call concerning erratic behavior and a potential threat to herself and others," the Park City Police Department told The U.S. Sun. "The officers responded to the family's Park City home. More information is not available at this time as an investigation is still underway." In a post to her Instagram Story after the scary footage was shared to her account, Kelley wrote, "This is horrible. I have been taken against my will." She continued, "Also...I am happy!! Happier than I have ever been. "I have NO idea why or how this is happening in AMERICA." Kelley added, "I am compliant, calm and respectful, and hopefully this is all sorted very quickly. "In the meantime, be kind to each other. This is one of the darkest things I've ever experienced." In the update, Kelley also asked someone to check on her kids while she was with the police. Scott and Kelley share three children together. SAD SPLIT The former couple were married for 21 years before Scott, 57, filed for divorce in Utah on June 9. In a statement on June 10, Kelley said their divorce had been 'a long, quiet journey for me—rooted in hope, patience, and care for our children. "While I will not speak publicly about the details, I feel peace knowing that I've done everything I can to walk this path with integrity and compassion.' Scott broke his silence earlier this week to confirm that he decided to end the marriage. 'After 21 years of marriage, I have made the most difficult decision of my life, and filed for divorce from my wife Kelley,' Scott said in a statement. "Our children have always been, and continue to be, the loves of our lives and our every priority, so I kindly ask for privacy at this time as we help guide them through this new chapter." 6 6


The Guardian
19 minutes ago
- The Guardian
Lie, cheat, steal, repeat: will the Traitors knockoffs ever cease?
This is a punt, but Fox might have started to commission new shows via the power of online thesauruses. Take its new reality show The Snake. It's a game of secrets and betrayal, of feigning one emotion to gain trust while you stab your new friends in the back. In other words, it's basically The Traitors. I don't know whether any of you have ever searched Merriam Webster for synonyms of 'traitor', but 'snake' is literally second on the list. And this laziness is indicative of the show itself, which is such a painfully halfhearted retread of The Traitors that it ends up being exhausting to watch. Hosted by Jim Jeffries, presenting in the style of a drunk guy shouting through his letterbox at 3am, The Snake gathers contestants from the most easily stereotyped professions – detective, ex-con, pastor, Onlyfans model – and has them connive at each other until only one remains. The runtime of the first episode is almost exclusively given over to letting these people describe exactly how unpleasant they are. Subsequent episodes involve gross-out challenges, like drinking meat smoothies or being relatively close to some insects, so in that regard a direct comparison to The Traitors is slightly unfair, because it's actually ripping off The Traitors and Fear Factor in equal measure. But perhaps this isn't such a surprise, because at the moment you could wade through television blindfolded and stumble into any number of shows that desperately want to be The Traitors. Maybe you saw Netflix's Million Dollar Secret, which was a version of The Traitors set in a luxury hotel. Or Netflix's The Trust, which was a version of The Traitors hosted by someone from CNN. Or maybe you saw the USA Network's Snake in the Grass, or ITV's The Fortune Hotel. Perhaps you even accidentally found yourself watching Amazon's 007: Road to a Million, which was a version of The Traitors explicitly designed to make you feel depressed about the future of James Bond. None of these shows are shy about their inspiration. They are all about people encouraged to screw over their peers for a quick buck. But the problem is that, as a format, The Traitors is unbeatable. It is beautifully simplistic. People move into a castle. Some of them have to secretly undermine everything. Everyone goes crazy with paranoia. That's it. It's bulletproof. A monkey could understand it. But the networks can't just produce a straight remake of The Traitors, because that would be cheating. And so every new iteration has to add some new element, a gimmicky format point that differentiates it just enough to be legally distinct. With The Fortune Hotel it was a sunny location. With The Snake it's adding too many unnecessary insects. But this sort of tinkering can easily overwhelm a format. In the UK, ITV recently produced a Traitors knock-off called Genius Game that was so absurdly convoluted – every episode was full of endless tedious explanations about bags and tokens and codes and zombies and garnets – that it quickly felt like the worst kind of hungover Boxing Day board game imaginable, the kind where everyone gives up halfway through and just ends up eating Twiglets in silence. It was like watching The Traitors, but a version of The Traitors that had been loaded with so much superfluous paraphernalia that its ankles shattered under the weight. And, true, television has always done this. We've already lived through the Pop Idol phase, where civilians were alternately encouraged to either sing or cry on command. And then there was the Love Island phase, where we found ourselves inundated with an infinite number of nimrods copping off in villas. The Great British Bake Off formula has been variously transposed to sewing, pottery, dressmaking, glassblowing, flower arranging and, probably before long, bereavement counselling. Now it is the turn of The Traitors. A year or two from now another show will get its time in the test tube. That said, maybe The Traitors deserves this fleet of copyists. After all, The Traitors is not a new idea. It's based on Mafia, a game devised in the halls of Moscow State University in the 1980s. It's also incredibly similar to the board game Secret Hitler, not to mention a 2004 BBC show that was literally called Traitor and ran for five episodes in 2004. Even so, The Traitors stands as the perfect refinement of the idea; it is thrilling and accessible in equal measure. None of its copycats have even come close to replicating it. Still, the night is young, and there are still 41 perfectly unused synonyms for 'traitor' left in the thesaurus. Coming soon: The Rat (The Traitors but organised crime), The Quisling (The Traitors but wartime Scandinavia) or The Stool Pigeon (The Traitors but everyone eats cold chicken bones out of bins).


The Guardian
30 minutes ago
- The Guardian
Trump scrambles to claim credit for Israel's Iran attack he publicly opposed
Donald Trump is walking a tightrope as he claims that he was fully aware of Israel's plans to launch massive airstrikes against Iran while continuing to distance the US from those strikes and deny Washington took any active role in the preparations. The White House's messaging has shifted quickly from Marco Rubio's arms-length description of the Israeli attack as a 'unilateral action', to Trump claiming on Friday morning that he was fully in the loop on the operation and that it came at the end of a 60-day ultimatum he had given Iran to 'make a deal' on its nuclear programme. 'Today is day 61,' he wrote on Truth Social. 'I told [Iran] what to do, but they just couldn't get there.' Trump's framing presents a good cop-bad cop dynamic of his approach with Benjamin Netanyahu, the embattled Israeli leader with whom he has a notoriously combative relationship. The US president has scrambled to now present the Israeli strikes, which he publicly claimed he did not want on Thursday, as a means of continuing his efforts to convince Iran to negotiate. 'They should now come to the table to make a deal before it's too late,' he said. But the discordant US response from to the strikes, including Rubio's Thursday evening statement, a hasty evacuation of some US personnel from the region and ambiguity over whether the US provided intelligence or would actively take part in Israel's defence from a likely counterattack, has raised questions over whether Israel may have moved ahead of the Trump administration as a way to present Washington with a fait accompli. 'They made a bet on President Trump,' said Elliott Abrams, a former diplomat and senior fellow for Middle Eastern studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, suggesting that Israel had pushed harder for strikes while the Trump administration had sought to maintain a diplomatic route. 'The Israelis struck and then today Trump called it 'excellent'.' While Israel had clearly given the United States advanced warning of the strike, claims that it was fully coordinated in Israeli state media have been subject to speculation: was Trump actually on board or was he repositioning himself on Friday in order to present the strikes as part of a coherent strategy. On Thursday, in remarks from the White House's East Room, Trump said that strikes on Israel could 'blow up' his diplomatic efforts to negotiate with the Iranian leadership and said he 'didn't want them going in'. He defended his decision to begin evacuating personnel because a strike 'could well happen'. 'The US started evacuating voluntarily non-essential personnel on Wednesday, barely 24 hours ahead of time, not enough time to really get people out of harm's way,' said Rosemary Kelanic, the Middle East director for Defense Priorities, a thinktank that pushes for a more restrained US foreign policy. 'So the question for me is what did the president know and when did he know it?' On Friday, Trump told the Wall Street Journal that he was not caught unaware by the strike: 'Heads-up? It wasn't a heads-up. It was, we know what's going on.' And he indicated that he had been apprised of future Israeli plans, writing that the 'next already planned attacks' would be 'even more brutal'. Senior Israeli officials also began to brief media that Trump had only pretended to oppose an Israeli attack and that they in fact had a 'green light' for the attack. But Kelanic and others noted that Israel may be seeking a means to 'entrap' the US into a war. In either case, it is doubtful that Israel could have prepared the attack in the past week without US knowledge. Officials at the Defense Intelligence Agency and other intelligence agencies would have seen the preparations for the airstrike – involving more than 200 Israeli fighter jets striking more than 100 targets across Iran – and probably understood that Israel was planning a major attack against Tehran. Late on Thursday, administration officials told Fox News that the US had replenished missiles for Israel's Iron Dome anti-air batteries in recent weeks in preparation for an expected counterattack. And the US in recent weeks had deployed B-52 bombers to its airbase on the remote Indian Ocean island of Diego Garcia, where multiple B-2 bombers have also been stationed since late March. B-2s stationed at the base took part in airstrikes on Houthi rebels in Yemen earlier this year, but the base would also serve as a launching point for airstrikes against Iran if the US were to join the conflict. But there are other explanations for the resupply of anti-air missiles to Iron Dome, particularly following the unprecedented barrage of ballistic missiles launched by Iran against Israel last year. And the US could have employed those B-2s and B-52s to strike the Fordow uranium enrichment centre, which is located deep underground and was not apparently struck in Friday morning's strikes. Still intact, it represents an important element in Iran's nuclear program that was not eliminated – at least in the first round of the Israeli attacks.