Bart first learned of Emhoff’s style at a fundraiser for Harris during the presidential primaries. “I noticed her as soon as she came in the door,” he said. During the summer of 2020, he and Mrs. Emhoff started talking about the possibility of her joining IMG. They got a call from Zoom, and she showed him her loom and some of her knitwear.
On her Instagram account, Ms. Emhoff often posts her knitting projects, such as brightly colored striped pants, although she notes that it is closed for orders. She also shows support for the slow fashion movement and the queer community. Her previous appearances as a model included an essay for Buffalo Zine, an independent fashion magazine.
Since Ms. Harris’s appointment in August, her modern, mixed family has garnered much attention and praise. Mrs. Emhoff described her stepmother, father and mother (Kerstin Emhoff, founder of a production company) as “a unit, like a group of parents of three.”
This summer, in a recorded video for the Democratic National Convention, Ms. Emhoff referred to the vice president by the nickname “Momala, the greatest stepmother in the world”. (When it comes to the second gentleman, she and her brother, Cole, 26, call him by his first name, Doug, almost exclusively. Before taking office, Mrs. Emhoff told The New York Times that she expected him to start knitting, “how I do.”)
The opening ceremony brought a new level of public attention to Ms. Emhoff. It wasn’t just her outfit – styled by Jill Lincoln and Jordan Johnson, who dressed Mrs. Emhoff in a burgundy Batsheva dress under the Miu Miu coat – or the Thom Browne coat, skirt and tie, with its red, white and blue accents, which she wore at the Covid-19 memorial service the night before, but the way she did possibly messed his eyebrows to Mike Pence on the Capitol steps.