Election fever in the United States are heating up. Even an ordinary dress designer and shop owner in Occoquan, Virginia, is feeling it after 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 the signs he put up in support of Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump.
"I actually started a flag war here in Occoquan, Virginia," Soriano told Fox News Digital during a video interview.
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."
Soriano and Johnson live in the residences above the store. After being cited by the city because of an ordinance 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.
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."
"We’re in an industry where we can’t just say what we want or how we feel," Johnson said.
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