I made one last attempt to press him for an idea of what Melania will be like compared to other first ladies. We know there will be opulence. We know that she loves Valentino and Chanel and Manolo and fur and diamonds and that she doesn’t like prints or going without makeup.

When Melania did the Vogue cover, the writer Sally Singer said that the bride of Trump, compared in the piece to a Bond girl, had “a slightly old-fashioned idea of femininity” because she refused to pose for Mario Testino without makeup or perfectly styled hair.

“She has those impossibly high four-inch, towering stilettos,” André said. “Clearly, her clothes will cling in the right places, accentuate her figure and her model-style long tresses. Get ready for super-cinched waists, hourglass silhouettes and pencil skirts. She is already into one-shoulder, which Jackie Kennedy wore by Oleg Cassini. Melania likes monotone matching coats and beige dresses, but that hair will always be flying once she goes down the stairs of Air Force One.

“She’s very private. She just wants to be a mother. It’s very similar to Jackie O, who also wanted to keep her kids out of the fray. When Barron was first born, she used to say: ‘I’m going off to play with Barron. I just want to spend time with Barron.’ So, in a way, I think that she’s maintaining her privacy with him and maintaining a kind of dignity because she’s not making statements. I don’t think that she would try to change the White House in any way. I don’t think that’s what she’s interested in.”

She never tried to modify the gaudy ’80s gilt in the three-story Trump Tower penthouse or the rushing fountain in the middle — a style of décor described by the Trump biographer Timothy O’Brien as Louis XIV on acid. As André has noted, Melania is not “a disrupter.” But Trump is.

“I wish them the best,” André said. “I want suddenly to see that she has incredible style, wake up and say, ‘Oh my God, look, isn’t that great?’ I really do think that there’s hope. We have to wait and see. As Sergei Diaghilev told Jean Cocteau, ‘Astonish me.’ ”