She Slays: Michelle Obama & the Power of Dressing Like You Mean It

TANISHA C. FORD

She was a vision, bold in marigold, a marigold Narciso Rodriguez sheath dress, that is. The reality was that few had tuned into the State of the Union address to hear the words of a lame duck president. Most were in it to see First Lady Michelle Obama, “Lady O,” as she is affectionately called, who dazzled from the time the camera panned up to her seat where she sat perched on high in the House of Representatives’ chamber.

And she did not disappoint. Michelle waved to onlookers as her signature fringe brushed her long eyelashes, effortlessly working her Black girl magic on the crowd. Later, we would learn that she had done it again. The FLOTUS broke the internet! Her vivid sartorial confection sold out on the Neiman Marcus website before Barack Obama could even finish his final speech.

When Michelle dresses the world watches, which is why her decision to wear a designer’s garment can make him or her a household name overnight. She has helped to launch and/or elevate the careers of designers of color including Tracy Reese, Naeem Khan, Duro Olowu, and Maki Oh. And seemingly overnight, Michelle Obama has joined the pantheon of Black women actors, singers, models, and socialites who have set the world ablaze with their signature looks. What sets her apart is her participation in the tumultuous space of American politics within which she must dress and present herself to the world.

From her color palette and favorite silhouettes, to the flounce of her bangs, Mrs. Obama has become a fashion tour-de-force. Her style team ensures that every look is flawless, and she wears a variety of designers to keep her look fresh and timeless. She has covered nearly every magazine: from Vogue and Ebony to Time and Fitness. While many first ladies have been featured in magazines, the breadth and variety of Michelle’s covers speak to her wide appeal. Fashion critics and industry insiders in particular have embraced Michelle as the fashion maven-in-chief. But they were merely confirming something Black women already knew: Michelle Obama is a bawse! Clothes can only enhance what exists within the person. A true stylista has to bring something to her garments. There’s no doubt, Michelle serves fierceness.

Her Black womanness matters to the millions of Black women and girls who admire her, feel protective of her, even though they’ve never met her. I am one of them, a Black woman professor who studies fashion in the academy—a place that does not always embrace style or Blackness.

In many ways, I feel our journeys run parallel: Black girls from the Midwest—her from Chicago, me from Fort Wayne, Indiana. I started my professional career while the Obamas were in office, and I was navigating some similar race and gender issues as Michelle (on a much smaller scale, of course): in what spaces were Black women’s bodies allowed, how should our bodies be adorned, and what does our adornment say about our “professionalism” and our “qualifications”? Early in my career, I wore garments in vibrant prints and colors, stiletto heels, wigs, and other items that departed from the staid elbow-patched, blazer-and-bow-tie ensemble that one associates with professors. As I reached professional milestones, I celebrated the fact that I was able to do so, largely on my own terms. And of course, my professional life is unfolding as I see Michelle Obama changing the face of the American First Lady, delivering powerful speeches, and slaying photo ops. She became my First Lady in a way that no other First Lady had been.

Even many non-Black Americans who were skeptical about Michelle in the beginning have been won over by her humorous, straightforward-yet-loving persona, regal beauty, and political intellect. A celebrity in her own right, she manages to occupy the roles of First Lady and fashionista while also maintaining her “sista girl realness.” She makes the voice of the White House one that is accessible and relatable. Black.

But her designer clothing has not protected her from racist and sexist comments about her body or problematic conversations about her personality, rooted in centuries-long stereotypes about Black women. Even though she is experiencing luxuries that most Black folks will never know, she still is not safe from social violence or threats of physical violence. It is her experience, as a Black woman who knows the pleasures and pains of being stylish while Black, that connects us to her.

Style has always mattered to Black Americans. We have been enslaved, been denied equal rights, and have been, and continue to be, the targets of state-sanctioned and vigilante violence. Clothing is a way we reclaim our humanity, express our creativity, celebrate our roots, and forge political solidarities. We style out as a mode of survival. So when and where Michelle Obama enters—dressed to the nines in Black designers such as Tracy Reese and Duro Olowu—Black women and girls enter with her. She is a symbol of many Black Americans’ hopes and dreams, a symbol of our collective hurt and pain. These histories are mapped onto her five-foot-ten-inch frame.

Sure, sure, her style is reflective of the highly crafted choreography of the political world. All of her looks are planned by a team of buyers, stylists, and estheticians. This tight-lipped inner circle keeps Obama’s secrets close, only sharing White House–approved information about her garments.

But I would like to believe she does indeed interject herself into the conversation. In my head, Malia and Sasha discuss fashion with their mom and help her pick out clothes as part of a mother-daughter ritual, similar to the one I had with my mother when I was growing up. For Black girls, bonding time with the women in their lives over hair and clothing are moments where they find safety and comfort, where family history is exchanged, and where they have playful conversations about what is and isn’t in style anymore. Getting dressed, then, for Michelle is about more than dazzling in a publication or at a State House dinner. It is about passing on knowledge and power to a younger generation. Thus, Michelle speaks to us, Black women and girls, when she dresses. She whispers to us as she strolls red carpets, attends White House galas, and ventures out on state-sponsored trips to places as far flung as South Africa and Taiwan: your body is beautiful, do not believe the lies they tell about you, you are Black and proud.

Plus, Michelle showed us from early on that she was frank and outspoken, that she had her own opinions and was not invested in playing the political game. To me, that suggests that she would not allow someone to dress her in clothes she did not feel comfortable wearing. In fact, she told fashion industry legend Andre Leon Talley in 2009, “I love clothes … first and foremost, I wear what I love.”

Moreover, the evolution of Michelle Obama’s style over the past eight years not only suggests to me that what she wears does matter to her but that she has become a student of fashion. She clearly has a keen eye for the colors and silhouettes that flatter her statuesque body and knowledge of the designers who make them.

When I first saw Michelle Obama on Oprah, before Barack Obama even announced his candidacy, with her polite flipped bob, muted colors, mom flats, and conservative cuts, I did not think of her as a fashion plate. I definitely never believed she would become the style goddess that she is now. Even early on the campaign trail, she rocked dark turtlenecks and bell-sleeved jackets. Her style was a bit dated. She looked older than her years. It was clear that she cared about her appearance, probably having been schooled from a young age about the importance of leaving the house well groomed as a sign of her sense of self-dignity and promise. But as a busy high-powered professional and working wife and mother, it was clear that functionality and practicality trumped style.

Once Barack Obama became the Democratic nominee, and certainly after the Obamas won the White House, Michelle underwent a style makeover. The rationale behind the switch from her high-power professional woman ensembles to what would become her signature glammed-up mom look for the first term of Obama’s presidency is a closely guarded secret. But we can look at the changes and draw conclusions about what her team was attempting to do.

Michelle’s early public image ratings were low. The American public and political insiders and members of the media elite deemed her a ball buster who would not play the game, who belittled her husband and told embarrassing stories that made him look bad in public. They were speculating about whether the high-powered career woman would be another Hillary-type of First Lady who conspicuously wore her political ambitions like a well-tailored suit. Even Black folks debated what kind of First Lady Michelle would be because it was clear to us that the Princeton- and Harvard-educated Obama was capable of doing it all, if she so chose. Her team clearly decided to mold her into a twenty-first-century version of a Jackie Kennedy type of First Lady, who was impeccably dressed as she attended to hearth and home.

Like the Kennedys, the Obamas would be packaged as the young, good-looking, charismatic couple who could cut a striking pose in designer digs while effortlessly telling jokes and holding court at their White House barbeques with their new celebrity friends. They were the couple you wanted to know. You wanted to socialize with them, be in their inner circle. Like Jackie Kennedy, Michelle would not project her own political ambitions. She would be the mom-in-chief, whose primary responsibilities were to her children and the home. She would be approachable and warm. Though she was stylish, her early style was not nearly as glamorous as Jackie Kennedy’s, but she started to build a name for herself in the fashion world because she wore many U.S.-based designers—ranging from Jason Wu to J. Crew.

Initially, Michelle did not have an official stylist. She was still purchasing her clothing from Chicago-based boutiques such as Ikram Goldman. It was Goldman who helped coordinate her election looks and her early First Lady style, which could be described as “soccer mom chic,” the PTA mom with a makeover. In line with her mom-in-chief branding, she wore J. Crew sheath dresses, often in floral prints, satin capri pants, and kitten heel mules. Mrs. Obama mixed high with low fashions (Talbots, Zara, Thakoon), again, in an attempt to stay relevant to middle-class moms.

Her clothes early in that first term seemed to constantly try to communicate, “I am not the big bad scary Black woman; I am more like you than you think.” And the clothing choices were reinforced by the narrative the White House created through television appearances and in print media. We were to believe that she had the same friends as before she became FLOTUS, that they still met and shared strategies for transporting the kids to and from soccer practice while figuring out if they should get a nanny. Team Obama even circulated pictures of Michelle shopping at Target and revealed that she secretly frequented the store, dressed down, shopping inconspicuously. She was also known to wear items more than once—a shocker!—such as her oft-recycled magenta silk chine Michael Kors dress, which she wore on election night. The March 2009 cover of Vogue featured Michelle delicately draped over a cream couch wearing a fuchsia sheath dress. The Annie Leibovitz–photographed spread placed Michelle in submissive poses, wearing feminine colors.

But as fashion critic Robin Givhan has noted, the genteel femininity through which we read Jackie Kennedy was not available to Michelle Obama as a Black woman. A perfect example of this is the media controversy around Obama’s choice to wear garments that exposed her upper arms. Though Jackie Kennedy also wore sleeveless frocks, her milky arms were read as lithe and petite, nonthreatening. Michelle, conversely, received a far more scathing response. The conservative media went crazy, writing stories about the First Lady’s arms. For them her arms were too muscular, too masculine. They were appalled by seeing the health-conscious Obama doing pushups in public to promote her anti-childhood obesity campaign Let’s Move! Obama was somehow stronger and larger than life, threatening even. This fixation on her arms allowed conservative political pundits to have a conversation about the whole of her body and the ways in which it was out of place in the White House.

Americans heard these messages, which for many only justified their own long-held prejudices about Blackness. Michelle was caught in the cyclone of anti-Black racism. Conservative media outlet Fox News referred to Michelle as Barack’s “baby mama,” damning language that both criticized women who had children with men to whom they were not married, but also was meant to undermine Michelle’s reality as wife and mother. It was a way to verbally punish her, to knock her back to size with racially and culturally coded language. She pressed forward despite being trapped in what Melissa Harris-Perry terms the “crooked room,” or a room that is not architecturally straight; therefore, when a Black woman tries to stand erect, she cannot. But instead of the world seeing the problem with the structure of the room, it determines the problem is the Black woman with poor posture. Stereotypical media representations of the Black woman as “jezebel,” “sapphire,” and “mammy” are examples of the real life implications of the crooked room.

Despite, and perhaps because of, the vitriolic response to Michelle’s upper arm flesh, her arms were more iconic than her fashion in that first term. Her team used this fervor to further brand Obama. They used her audacity to bare her arms as a way to position her as a more youthful, more in touch with trends, cooler, and more transgressive First Lady than Hillary and the Bushes. She was a new-millennium First Lady. At some point, the team stopped trying to assuage Americans’ fears of her Blackness and started reminding people that she was a bad ass, and she had the “guns” to prove it.

Team Obama began to acknowledge that she was not like the other First Ladies and that her Blackness did make her different. For example, by virtue of her skin tone, she ushered in new trends for First Lady fashions. She opted to wear colors that deviated from the standard political color palette, choosing bold colors that looked good on Black skin. Where most first ladies wore reds, blues, and pastels, Obama mixed these colors with vibrant pinks and rich jewel tones. Why should she try to fit the demure mold of other, white First Ladies, when historically the claim to femininity and the protection that came with it wasn’t afforded to Black women? Michelle Obama found a way to work within the demands of the office of First Lady while transgressing these same norms.

We, as Black women, respected and admired how she lived between these two tensions: the stature and visibility of the office of First Lady and the disturbing social responses to her Black womanness. We could relate to the range of questions we imagined folks in the political world asked her, based on the questions our own colleagues and classmates asked us about our hair and our culture. Even though her platform was larger than ours, her daily routine—with her team of secret service agents who clocked and coordinated her every move—different than ours, she was us. Even if she was the First Lady, first and foremost, she was a Black woman, and no one would let her forget that. And she seemed to never forget that herself.

This new Michelle brand, which had no historical precedents, played well with millennials especially, and her public opinion ratings started to climb. According to Gallup, her approval ratings topped Barack Obama’s. This was in part due to her frequent media appearances, powerful celebrity friends (including Beyoncé), and her style, which was becoming edgier as the Obamas neared the second campaign. In short, the Obamas had become the darlings of American popular culture. They had transcended politics. They were bonafide celebrities. That “we’re just like you, America … only a bit cooler” shtick that marked the early first term no longer played. Michelle’s new look for President Obama’s second term was a reflection of their new status as cultural icons.

She had some nice fashion “moments” in the first four years, but in the second term, she clearly announced that she came to slay! She and her team started taking major risks, and her style explicitly referenced working-class Black American sartorial traditions. No longer was she seeking to blend in, she was making jaw-dropping fashion statements. Her earrings and other accessories became more opulent, her outfits more fitted, her hair more bouffant. She proved that she still had a lot of “South Side Chi” in her!

Right before the 2013 inauguration, Michelle debuted new bangs for her forty-ninth birthday, which set the tone for the second term. Her hairstylist Johnny Wright created a modern, softer take on the fringe bob, which elevated her look from soccer mom to cosmopolitan stylista. At the inauguration she paired her new hair with a silk Thom Browne jacquard dress, an embellished J. Crew waist belt, Reed Krakoff suede boots, and fuchsia leather gloves. As her bestie Beyoncé belted out the “Star Spangled Banner,” Michelle ushered in a new era of Obama style in which she would solidify herself as the fashionable First Lady, rivaling Jackie Kennedy for the crown.

Looking more youthful the older she gets, Obama takes more fashion risks as she no longer has to prove to the American public that she is who she says she is. Besides, her comical “evolution of the mom dance” skit on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon pretty much bodied all of her critics. Moreover, as the body positive and curvy body movement has grown in popularity, Michelle and team have started showing off her curves. While A-lined dresses were a main staple in the first term, she has increasingly worn garments that are cinched at the waist to accentuate her curvy figure or risqué looks such as the off-the-shoulder fitted Zac Posen bustier dress she wore to Black Girls Rock! in 2015. The side-swept hair that hung past her shoulders and the black Vera Wang fitted mermaid gown at the state dinner with the president of China is another example of her edgier look. I remember watching the news footage and thinking, “President Obama looks like he’s got a young thang on his arm!,” as she leaned in to straighten his bowtie (one of their classic “cool kid” moves).

Michelle Obama has forever changed the possibilities of the position of FLOTUS. Designers clamor to dress her. She even sports looks straight off the runway, such as the Derek Lam suede patchwork dress she wore to Beijing in 2014. She has created a new color palette for First Ladies and has made wearing one’s arms out cool for women over forty. But the thing that true fashionistas know is that clothes are just clothes on an unconfident body. One must embody style and attitude in order for the looks to make an impact. Because of Michelle’s reality as a Black woman, she shifted the conversation about dress, about beauty, and body. But of course, we as Black women been knowing that Michelle Obama was magic.