Although far less important than the political violence at the White House correspondent’s dinner in Washington over the weekend, the sartorial choices of the Maga administration are now getting airtime – and one dress is causing a particular furore.

It is being reported that Jennifer Rauchet, wife of the US secretary of defence, Pete Hegseth, wore what appeared to resemble a gown listed on Shein for $42 (and similar to another on Temu for half the price).

Naturally, some backlash has been inevitable. Shein is a gargantuan Chinese fast-fashion marketplace, and Temu is the country’s answer to Amazon – while Hegseth champions nationalism and “America first”. The US also continues to engage in a trade war with China, and Rauchet’s husband has been outspoken on the threat he sees the nation posing to the world. While we should never tar a woman with the same brush as her husband, there’s reason to believe that Rauchet, a former Fox News executive producer, may have beliefs that aren’t too dissimilar.

But the onion-like layers that have unpeeled – the backlash, and then the backlash to the backlash – have been more circuitous than you might expect from a one-shouldered gown with a smattering of rhinestone appliqué, another near-identical version of which costs £77.39 on AliExpress at the time of writing.

On the one hand, influencer Ella Devi, a self-described “socialist socialite”, posted on X: “peter hegeseth’s [sic] wife wore a dress from temu to the white house correspondents dinner (I’m not joking).” The tweet has since been viewed more than 6m times. More forensically, fashion industry watchdog Diet Prada posted to their 3.4 million followers: “Pete Hegseth’s wife wore fast fashion from overseas … despite her party’s nationalist ideologies.”

Some then took umbrage at the umbrage over what appeared, from their perspectives, to be Rauchet’s salt-of-the-earth sartorial choice. In response to Devi’s post, far-right political activist Laura Loomer came to Rauchet’s aid: “She looks amazing. I thought the left was about ‘eating the rich?’ Now you want to dunk on someone who didn’t waste $10,000 on a dress they will only ever wear once.”

Sustainable fashion expert and writer Aja Barber, who has thought longer and harder than most when it comes to questions of ethical fashion, calls out the collective outrage for what it is: political point-scoring. “Their crimes are many,” she says of the Trump administration and those in its orbit, “and wearing a dress from a sweatshop is among them. But, generally, our society should actually just take it seriously, even when it’s not someone who is serving in a fascist dictatorship administration.”

It’s not the first time fashion has been weaponised, whether on the left or the right of politics. “When someone like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez wears something that is expensive but not made in a sweatshop, people go: ‘Oh, I thought you were a woman of the people,’” says Barber. She was widely criticised when she attended the exclusive Met Gala wearing a dress emblazoned with the slogan “Tax the rich”. The first lady of New York City, Rama Duwaji, faced backlash after wearing “expensive” Miista boots from Europe for her husband’s swearing in. God forbid Bernie Sanders should ever break out of those homespun mittens and anoraks. When Melania Trump wore a $39 Zara jacket scrawled with “I really don’t care, do u?”, during a trip to a migrant child detention centre, there was uproar around the slogan, but not the unnaturally low price.

Politicians, royals and celebrities are lauded when they wear clothes that the lowly likes of you or I could afford; Kate Middleton really seems to earn her “people’s princess” title when she deigns to wear a Hobbs coat or LK Bennett boots. But a win for humility isn’t necessarily a win full stop, because it often ignores the bigger picture, most notably the garment workers – the global working class, often based in the global south – who are entirely erased by that narrative.

Barber thinks that, rather than bipartisan point-scoring via weaponising dresses or shoes, we need to state the deeper truth: a dress should cost more than $40. “Clothing should cost a lot more than what we are seeing on the high street,” she says, let alone what we are seeing via these online hyper-fast fashion companies. “We’ve been trained to see high street and mall prices as fair, when the truth is that those prices have only remained artificially depressed because of the exploitation that is built into the system.”

As Barber has previously stated online: “Our society could be massively improved if people stop being so cheap. That’s not to be confused with being poor.”

Fast fashion is often posited as the clothes that less well-off people need to buy. But Barber thinks this is “a lie”. “The entire system would fall apart overnight if it were just poor people buying it,” she says. “There would not be the profit margins that allowed these companies to get away with exploiting garment workers if it were just people within poverty purchasing.”

Back to the Trump administration and its spurious frock. It’s not like Rauchet hasn’t got the cash for somewhere less ethically compromised than Shein and the like. Plus, spending money on a dress made by a workforce paid a fair wage would actually be more of a win for authenticity than going for the dirt-cheap dress made by a subjugated, poorly paid workforce.

Barber is clear-cut: “No one should be wearing sweatshop clothes. Not your political adversary and not your friends either.”