The president-elect’s infamous hair and tanned skin have been mocked for making him look absurd, but they are choices that suggest there is no one in his life who can tell him he is wrong

In the normal run of things, it would seem inconsequential to be discussing as fatuous a matter as the president-elect’s skin and hair before he has even set foot in the Oval Office.

However, given the circumstances, I am going to go right ahead.

A line heard frequently in the days since Donald Trump’s victory is that the media took Trump literally but didn’t take him seriously, whereas the voters took him seriously but didn’t take him literally. The truth in this that was there all along is in the aesthetics of the Trump family.

As a visual spectacle, the Trumps are like nothing modern politics has seen before. Donald has a touch of Homer Simpson in the utter fictionality of his skin tone. He has a note of Liberace in the stiff upward swirl of his hair. There is something of the ageing Elvis impersonator in the way his eyes disappear like pin pricks into his face. There is Las Vegas, too, in hair the colour of white paint in a smoking room – a blond that makes Boris Johnson look positively wholesome. The only politician Trump even vaguely resembles is from dystopian science fiction: Donald Sutherland’s white-haired President Snow from The Hunger Games, a tyrannical despot who stages gladiatorial battles to the death between his teenage subjects to bolster his power.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest As a visual spectacle, the Trumps are like nothing modern politics has seen before. Photograph: Jim Spellman/WireImage

It is dangerous to assume that if a man looks absurd, the joke is harmless. (This much, perhaps, we learnt from Jimmy Savile.) That Trump looks so ridiculous – that he so spectacularly fails to conform with the sleek ideal of the modern politician embodied by Barack Obama or Justin Trudeau – contributed to the assumption of many that Trump as president just couldn’t happen. All of this now needs to be revised. It is a measure of the contempt in which voters hold the Washington elite that the Trump aesthetic – light entertainment, huge ego, crude jokes – seemed no more untrustworthy or slippery to voters than Hillary Clinton’s focus-grouped power bob.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The Simpsons was spot on with its goggled-up portrayal of Donald Trump.

Trump’s skin is extraordinary. “Orange” doesn’t begin to cover the oddness of a shade that makes the previous intake of fake tan addicts – Peter Stringfellow, Simon Cowell – look sophisticated. Trump is the colour of cheap fried doughnuts: lurid and unhealthy (adjectives that could be used to describe Homer, who is, after all, a cartoon). Interestingly, there is little attempt made to hide the white circles around his eyes left by tanning goggles. (It must be spray or an old-school solarium. My heart says solarium, because he is definitely mad enough to be doing that every day; but my money is on spray, because of the ketchuppy tones.) Perhaps the white circles are a clumsy attempt at emulating a ski tan, the ultimate status symbol of the successful businessman that Trump claims to be.

Those white goggles – along with hair that looks like a toupee yet seems, even more bafflingly, to be his real hair, which he chooses to style to look like a toupee – are chilling because they make it clear that there is no one in the room who can have a quiet word in Trump’s ear when he is patently getting something wrong. What Trump chooses to do in the tanning booth is one thing; how he behaves with those oft-conjured nuclear codes is another.

And – to more serious matters – what will the new first lady look like? Melania Trump’s every wardrobe and hair choice will be combed for clues as to whether this presidency will be a joke, a cartoon, or can settle into something more statesmanlike. Michelle Obama took her first lady wardrobe from the hallowed chapters of White House history (Jackie Kennedy) and from ordinary people (bare arms, shorts on holiday). Melania Trump borrows hers from fiction. Her sleek, curvy shift dresses are Claire Underwood, but her long hair adds a chocolate-box femininity.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Ivanka with her daughter, Donald and Melania on election day. Photograph: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

There is a fascinating tension in Melania’s look – one between cliched third-wife glamour and a ballsy kind of grit. Possibly I’m reading too much into this, but I was interested by Mrs Trump’s polling-booth outfit, in which she shoulder-robed a double-breasted camel coat. She looked like a boss – a male boss. You could almost picture the cigar. And then, later that night, she wore a jumpsuit rather than a dress for the victory speech. I was struck by this choice, because the jumpsuit has become party look of choice for young women who love dressing up but wish to subvert the male gaze. The Man Repeller fashion blog, named after the type of on-trend clothes men find off-putting, is big on jumpsuits. Yes, we have all seen the fur-lined bikini shot, but Melania is a long way from that now – as the jumpsuit proves. The age of the Trump aesthetic starts here. And we had better start taking it seriously.