A resurfaced photo shows a 13-year-old Julian Casablancas, background, at the Maybelline Presents 1991 Look of the Year event with Donald Trump and his daughter, Ivanka Trump, drawing attention as the Strokes frontman faces backlash over recent political remarks.
As the Strokes frontman Julian Casablancas draws renewed attention for his outspoken political remarks, a decades-old photograph linking him to Donald Trump’s social world has given the backlash a new focal point.
The image, taken by celebrity photographer Ron Galella at the Maybelline Presents 1991 Look of the Year event at the Plaza Hotel in New York, shows Trump and his daughter, Ivanka Trump, then 9, among a crowd of guests.
In the background is a young Casablancas, then a child moving through the rarefied Manhattan fashion milieu that shaped his early life.
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Its reappearance this week has landed with unusual force. Casablancas was already facing criticism after a recent appearance on Kareem Rahma’s “SubwayTakes Uncut,” where, when asked for his most controversial opinion, he said: “American Zionists get the benefits of white privileged people, but talk like they are Black people during slavery.”
He later added: “Just for the people that are going to be like, ‘Hamas, October 7th.’ Um, yes, bad.”
The remarks came just days after the Strokes closed their second Coachella Valley Music & Arts Festival set on Saturday, April 18, with a politically charged visual montage criticizing U.S. foreign intervention and showing imagery tied to Iran and Gaza.
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That performance spread quickly online, reigniting debate over Casablancas’ politics and public persona just months before the band’s scheduled headlining set at San Francisco’s Outside Lands music festival.
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The resurfaced Galella photograph has only sharpened that debate, because it collapses so much of Casablancas’ biography into a single frame.
Born in New York City in 1978, Casablancas is the son of John Casablancas, founder of Elite Model Management, and Jeanette Christiansen, a Danish model and former Miss Denmark.
He grew up around extraordinary privilege, attending elite schools in New York and later the Institut Le Rosey boarding school in Switzerland, where he met future Strokes guitarist Albert Hammond Jr.
At the same time, Casablancas has long pushed back against any version of his life story that begins and ends with money.
Julian Casablancas of the Strokes performs during the Austin City Limits Music Festival at Zilker Park in Austin, Texas, in 2025. The band is set to headline Outside Lands in San Francisco in August.
In interviews over the years, he has described a far less polished adolescence after his parents’ divorce, one shaped by drinking alcohol, roaming New York and identifying less with prep-school gloss than with the city’s rougher edges. He has credited his stepfather, painter Sam Adoquei, with expanding his musical tastes and worldview.
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The 1991 photo does not reveal a secret. That tension has always been part of Casablancas’ mystique as the downtown rock star with uptown roots, the beneficiary of privilege who has built much of his artistic identity around alienation, rebellion and distrust of entrenched power.
Meanwhile, the band’s seventh studio album, “Reality Awaits” — its first in six years — is due June 26 on Cult Records/RCA Records. Recorded in Costa Rica with producer Rick Rubin and finished across several locations, the album precedes a run of high-profile dates, including the Strokes’ headlining slot at Outside Lands on Aug. 8.
The Strokes top a 2026 bill that also includes Charli xcx and Rüfüs Du Sol, part of what festival co-founder Allen Scott has described as a lineup meant to “excite and surprise,” pairing established acts with newer names such as Turnstile and Ethel Cain.
