(Again, Ms. Trump has not been associated with Opening Ceremony or with Kenzo.)

The day after Ms. Theallet’s letter, Fashionista, a fashion website with more than 2.5 million monthly readers, offered an editorial explaining, “How We Plan on Covering (or Not Covering) Melania Trump’s Fashion Choices.”

“We plan on having no part in normalizing the Trump family, particularly when it comes to cataloging the first lady’s fashion choices,” it wrote. “As individuals, we don’t want to contribute to humanizing or making light of an administration that poses such serious threats to women, minorities, immigrants and more, and that has so many other troubling implications that we can’t ignore — but that we also can’t talk about in sufficient depth, because this is first and foremost a site about fashion and beauty. We won’t go so far as to say we’ll never write about what Ms. Trump is wearing, but we’re going to reserve it for strictly newsworthy occasions.”

As to what those may be: the Met Gala, state dinners, the usual. What they may not be: stepping off Air Force One.

It will be interesting to see if such public statements of intent continue. More common, so far, has been the reaction of another designer, who asked to remain anonymous because he was not ready to take an official position, but who told me that he had been contacted by a member of the Trump family who wanted to borrow a dress for a public occasion. The designer said that he simply pretended he did not get the message.

In any case, the conversation is heating up and the stakes are rising.

One designer, Tommy Hilfiger, who has an office in Trump Tower, told WWD this week that he would have no problem dressing the new first lady.