In a photograph taken on January 7, 1991, at the Hotel Helmsley in New York, the then real estate magnate Donald Trump is seen sitting next to his second wife, Marla Maples, and a woman who embodies like few others the aesthetic of political excess of the 20th century: the Filipina Imelda Marcos. It is a scene of the jet set that orbited in the same constellation of power, money, and vanity.
Trump and Imelda were not strangers. They moved in the same circles, shared hosts, and a common idea of luxury as a display. He, builder of a personal brand based on the golden excess of Manhattan. She, the widow of Ferdinand Marcos, the dictator who ruled the Philippines for two decades with an iron fist, and who had turned the State into a private safe. Today, Trump (79 years old) is the president of the USA, while Imelda (96 years old) is the mother of the current president of the Philippines.
When the Marcoses fled in 1986 after the People Power Revolution, they did so by helicopter, leaving behind a palace turned into an involuntary museum of corruption: mink coats, hundreds of dresses, and over a thousand pairs of shoes. That inventory was much more than an anecdote.
For years, Imelda had acted as an international emissary of the regime, governor of Manila, a political figure with her own power and a friendly face of a dictatorship that, according to estimates, looted up to $10 billion. Meanwhile, she cultivated an image of global sophistication, comparing herself to Jacqueline Kennedy, although her detractors saw echoes of Eva Perón in her. Imelda, nicknamed the "iron butterfly," went from winning beauty contests (always surrounded by suspicions of rigging) to deploying an attractive parallel diplomacy alongside the darkness of the martial law that her husband had decreed in the Philippines.
That diplomacy that took off took her from Moscow to New York, passing through Beijing. Although when she crossed paths with Trump, the Marcoses were already a family exiled in Hawaii after their overthrow. Nevertheless, they had managed to maintain networks, contacts, and, above all, a narrative of victimhood that would bear fruit decades later. Imelda returned to the Philippines in 1991 to face corruption charges. Against all odds, not only did she avoid a definitive downfall, but she rebuilt her political power: she was elected four times as a congresswoman and became the axis of the family's rehabilitation.
This project culminated in 2022 when her son, Ferdinand Marcos Jr, known as Bongbong, won the presidency. "How is Imelda?" Trump asked the Filipino leader when they first spoke in November of that year. Today, the elderly Imelda lives in a skyscraper in Manila, free despite a 2018 conviction to over four decades in prison for corruption, pending appeals in a system where political and judicial power often intertwine.
Meanwhile, the story of Imelda's shoes has found an unexpected echo on the other side of the Pacific. As revealed by American media, Trump recently developed the habit of gifting Florsheim Oxford shoes, with an average price of $145, to his inner circle: from Vice President JD Vance to Secretary of State Marco Rubio. An apparently banal, almost endearing gesture that resonates, however, with an old story: that of power expressed through objects, politics turned into a material symbol.
If in the United States, those shoes function as a nod of belonging, in the Philippines Imelda's footwear remains an uncomfortable reminder. Part of her collection is now exhibited in a museum in Manila, as a warning and tourist attraction. Accumulation as a political language. In addition to international brands, Imelda also collected local footwear. She once mentioned that manufacturers in her country would deliver 10 pairs of shoes per week to her.
These days, a musical inspired by Imelda's life —following the documentary "The Kingmaker" by filmmaker Lauren Greenfield— is successfully staged in several major cities in the Philippines, remixing pop, politics, and propaganda. The show is not openly hagiographic, but neither condemnatory. Like the country itself, it moves in a gray area where memory competes with fascination.
One of the cities where the musical is performed is in Cebu, the oldest city in the Philippines, founded by the Spaniards in 1565 as the first European settlement in the archipelago. "For older Filipinos, the Marcoses are synonymous with corruption," explains Jon Velasco, university professor. "But many young people, who are the ones voting for Marcos, have been seduced by false promises to return the country to a past splendor that never really existed." In Carbon Market, one of the busiest spaces in the city, Sun Mendoza, a crafts vendor, points out: "My mother always said that Imelda spent too much on clothes and shoes while the country suffered." Twenty-something Inna Long believes that Imelda is repudiated as much as adored in the country. "She was a master at turning politics and repression into a spectacle."