A dress designer and shop owner in Occoquan, Virginia, is at a loss following a bizarre encounter with a local woman who called the police on his boutique for demonstrating his First Amendment rights by hanging Trump signs out front.
Andre Soriano, an atelier dress designer who is well-known for curating the “Make America Great Again” gown singer-songwriter Joy Villa wore to the 2017 Grammy Awards, received legal notice that he must remove signs in support of former President Trump from his business.
“I actually started a flag war here in Occoquan, Virginia,” Soriano told Fox News Digital during a video interview.
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Andre Soriano designed the dress singer-songwriter Joy Villa wore to the 2017 Grammy Awards. (Fox News Digital; Getty Images)
Soriano said though the first few moments of the encounter were pleasant, almost immediately, he was met with irrationality and backlash about the patriotic decor perched at the front of the store.
“The reason I put my Trump dress outside is, so I don’t have to encounter [this],” Soriano said.
Audra Johnson, a political activist and friend of Soriano, recorded the run in and posted it to social media after he texted her for help with the scene.
“I have a video of her hiding in a bush,” Johnson told Fox News Digital. “I don’t know what she was doing.”
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The duo said the woman was hysterically crying in the street and that she did call the police. A lone officer removed the woman from the store’s entrance and Johnson said she was taken to a local restaurant to “calm her down”.
“As an American citizen, as a First Amendment in our great nation, you can express yourself by putting your signs in your home and expressing who you are as an individual, whether it’s religion, whether it’s politics or anything that you feel, without harming anyone,” Soriano said. “That’s just the freedom of artistic expression and being free in America, and nowadays, you can’t even express that.”
Soriano and Johnson live in the residences above the store. After being cited by the city to remove the Trump-supporting signs from the business, they suspended them from their homes, despite having been hung for years prior to the incident.
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Joy Villa has been known to sport dresses that Hollywood finds controversial to red carpet events. The first she wore was the “Make America Great Again” dress that Andre Soriano designed for her in 2017 after Donald Trump won the presidency. (Getty Images)
However, they were cited a second time to remove some, but not all, the signs.
“We’re just trying our hardest to not get fines we can’t pay,” Johnson said.
“We follow rules,” Soriano said. “We don’t disrespect anyone.”
The business owner is appalled by the ordinance as he believes America is the “land of the free, not the land of what people think.”
“I’m an American designer,” Soriano said. “I am free to express and create whatever I want.”
Soriano, originally from the Philippines, said his mother immigrated the family to America when he was a teenager to live the American Dream.
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Political activist and friend of Andre Soriano caught a woman on camera throwing a fit and calling the police on Soriano’s gown shop for having signs in support of Trump hanging out front. (Andre Soriano)
“I love America,” Soriano said.
The fashion designer said he was once employed by stars, including Rihanna, Pharrell Williams, Miley Cyrus and Courtney Love, but was blacklisted when he designed the infamous “MAGA” dress from 2017.
“That’s when our lives changed,” he said. “We had death threats.”
“There are a lot of celebrities in Hollywood that are very divisive, and they didn’t really like President Trump,” Soriano said.
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The creative director added that he lost his friends, clients and potential business opportunities in California.
Johnson was also blacklisted as a stage and film actress when she was photographed marching at Rosa Parks Circle in Grand Rapids, Michigan, with a sign that read “Trump is your president.”
“We’re in an industry where we can’t just say what we want or how we feel,” Johnson said.
“We don’t fit the mold.”