First Lady Fashion: How the U.S. Has Embraced Michelle Obama
←
→
Page content transcription
If your browser does not render page correctly, please read the page content below
First Lady Fashion: How the U.S. Has Embraced Michelle Obama Alisa K. Braithwaite Abstract The inauguration of the first African American president of the United States also introduced the nation to its first African American first lady, Michelle Obama. The acceptance of a black woman into a role that has symbolized the somewhat antiquated gentility of a nation that still struggles mightily with its acceptance of racial and cultural difference has been no small feat. There was much concern about how the public would receive Michelle Obama because of these stereotypes, and her introduction to the campaign was somewhat rocky because of her intellectual credentials and her willingness to express her discontent with the country. But the resistance to this new black female figure began to melt away when the attention turned to her fashion sense. Suddenly the somewhat threatening black woman became instantly relatable because she not only wore the clothes that American women wanted to wear, but she also wore the clothes that they were already wearing. Her fashion sense became the panacea for dealing with the stereotypes that surrounded her race and gender. This paper, however, questions whether focusing on Michelle Obama’s fashion has become a way for this nation to evade the very real concerns about how black women are perceived, or if it could be a way in which these negative perceptions may be overcome. Through the lens of black feminist theory and Barthes’ foundational work on fashion theory I will explore what impact the media coverage of Michelle Obama’s fashion may have on American cultural perceptions of black women. Key Words: American, Michelle Obama, fashion, narrative, representation, race.
2 First Lady Fashion: How the U.S. Has Embraced Michelle Obama ***** I would like to begin by examining three images of the current first lady of the United States, Michelle Obama. The first is the July 21, 2008 cover of The New Yorker magazine. It features a parody of the Obamas based on the Republican party’s efforts to discredit them. Right wingers accused Barack Obama of terrorist leanings because of his name and cultural background, and painted his wife as a frightening black revolutionary who was not proud of her country and liberally used the racial slur “Whitey.” The second is the March 16, 2009 cover of The New Yorker. This image appeared after the election and the inauguration of President Obama and depicts the first lady as a fashion model working the runway in some of her more famous ensembles. The turquoise dress, for example, appeared at the 2008 Democratic convention where she made a speech that highlighted her family values and effectively reversed her negative reputation in the media. The third image is the official White House portrait of Michelle Obama released in February of 2009. She wears a black, sleeveless, Michael Kors dress that reveals her much-discussed arms, and a string of pearls, the
Alisa K. Braithwaite 3 jewelry that has become one of her signature accessories. Unlike the other two images, it is an actual photograph of Michelle in an outfit that she chose. I juxtapose these images to consider what narrative they tell of how the media perceives, or requires us to perceive Michelle Obama. The covers of The New Yorker clearly represent the ebbs and flows of the media tide in relation to Michelle, while the White House portrait gives us a perfectly coiffed and controlled image to define how the administration would like us to see Michelle as first lady. Neither of the magazine covers, I would argue, is necessarily a positive image, but they both point to the real issue of the ability to control one’s image in the media. The complete turnaround that these covers display shows how fickle these representations can be, but in spite of their caprice, they are quite powerful when they are in vogue. When I witnessed the shift from fear of Michelle to love of Michelle that these covers portrayed, I could not help but wonder what effect these images might have for black women as a whole. Would this country begin to see Michelle as the norm for black women, or would the protagonist of the recent film “American Violet”—a poor young mother who lives in public housing with her children by different fathers—continue to prevail? Would this country refrain from seeing educated black women as politically threatening or would they still consider us a wild species in need of domestication? As a literary scholar, I felt the need to think about these questions in terms of narrative. These images are telling a story and, of course, the bounty of articles and blogs about Michelle create a narrative, as well. But there is also the narrative that Michelle conveys about who she is and what we can expect of her as first lady. I wondered if it would be possible for a new narrative to emerge about black women in America as a result of the stories we were hearing and reading about Michelle Obama. To explore this question in more depth I would like to look at two aspects in particular that have framed the narrative of
4 First Lady Fashion: How the U.S. Has Embraced Michelle Obama Michelle Obama. The first is race and the second is fashion. When Michelle Obama entered the scene during the Obama campaign, the fact of Obama’s race became more concrete. By marrying a black woman, the biracial Obama, whose upbringing was in a predominantly white community whose nexus was a white mother and white grandparents, made a clear choice to live his life within the black community with a black wife, black children, and a black extended network of family and friends. His life and his campaign would have been markedly different if his wife were white. Kim McLarin’s article on theRoot.com speaks to the importance of Obama’s choice for black women. She writes: “Barack chose Michelle. He chose one of us, and I am thrilled.”1 “One of us” refers to dark-skinned women, women with no visible signs of whiteness in their genetic make-up. Their skin is dark brown, their hair is naturally coily, their lips are full and sometimes so are their thighs. They do not fit into the whiteness = beauty paradigm that dominates American culture. McLarin celebrates Obama’s choice, not only because of its affirmation of the acceptability of black women as wives, but also because of its acknowledgement of Michelle as beautiful and prized. Michelle’s blackness added legitimacy to Obama’s campaign for the black community because it symbolized a clear acceptance of blackness as a part of both his personal and professional life. Michelle Obama made Obama’s blackness real for the white community in the US, as well, and we see the fear of that blackness in the parody on The New Yorker cover. Michelle was most infamously criticized by conservatives for saying at campaign stump speeches in Madison and Milwaukee, Wisconsin that she was “proud of [her] country” for the “first time in [her] adult life” because the people finally seemed ready for hope and change in their support of Barack Obama as a candidate.2 The conservatives questioned why an American would not be proud, particularly after all the strides that the country had made in the last twenty-six years, the span of Michelle’s adult lifetime. It quickly became clear that Michelle’s feelings were
Alisa K. Braithwaite 5 related to the experience of race in America. Race continued to be the elephant in the room that no one was directly addressing, yet her comment, and the fact that she was a black woman saying it, made white Americans keenly aware of the difference between them and the hopeful candidate. Black people continued to feel neglected, disrespected, and abused in the US in spite of all the strides the country had made. Obama’s candidacy, then, was not an opportunity for the country to pat itself on the back for its progress, but instead a challenge to show that it was capable of taking the next progressive step. The narrative that the conservatives were creating about Michelle threatened to hinder that progressive step. Her small acknowledgement of resistance to the status quo—formerly an empowering position for blacks in the US—has, post 9/11, become equivalent to terrorist discontent. Paired with extreme right-wing efforts to pigeon-hole the Obamas into black stereotypes (they referred to Michelle as Obama’s “baby mama”) the Obamas were faced with an image of themselves that was not in their control. How, then, would such narratives change? In her book Black Looks: Race and Representation bell hooks examines the images of black people produced in the US and considers how the negative images might be shifted. Her most pressing concern is how black people have internalized many of those negative images. She writes: “It is only as we collectively change the way we look at ourselves and the world that we can change how we are seen.3 hooks underscores the importance of self-fashioning in the recreation of an image. With many black people accepting the negative images of themselves as valid, so much so that they often fashion themselves in that image or against that image, it is nearly impossible for something new to emerge. To successfully shift away from these negative images, black people themselves must create alternative images that are independent from the one that predominates. The Obamas have been actively remaking the image of the black
6 First Lady Fashion: How the U.S. Has Embraced Michelle Obama American family, but in a cautious way. While Obama has begun to make yearly speeches on the importance of fatherhood in the black community, Michelle Obama is still careful about being perceived as the ultimate role model for the black family. As she said in Essence magazine: “This is one model of what a Black family can look like, but there are hundreds of others that work just as well …”4 Part of the Obamas self-fashioning is making the clear and consistent point that their family is neither new nor special in the black community. While the president’s speeches speak to an unfortunately real issue within the black community, Michelle’s disavowals of her position as role model suggest that the crisis of black fatherhood should not become the definition of the black family. Neither should their two-parent, two-child with extended family member model. Rather, the black family may take many different successful forms, just as the white family does. The presence of multiple stepparents (a stereotype for white families) also does not subscribe to the healthy norms for a family, but it is still a common family structure that Michelle avoids discounting when she rejects her family model as an ideal. At the same time, however, she emphasizes the fact that the Obamas and the Robinsons are not the only black families that function in this way: “For me [our image] is a reminder of what is already the reality. The women in videos and the stereotypes are just not the truth of who we are as a community … So [maybe our family] can be a reminder that all you need to do is look around your own community and you will see this same family in churches and in schools.”5 By defining her family as a reminder rather than a model, she suggests that the Obamas are not aspirational but representative of a narrative of blackness that was always there, but ignored by mainstream media. Now that her family is mainstream, her choice of words acts to make the black middle-class that they represent mainstream, as well. In focusing more specifically on Michelle’s image as opposed to
Alisa K. Braithwaite 7 her family’s however, we need to turn to the subject of fashion. Roland Barthes’ The Fashion System argues that in order for fashion to circulate, the garment must experience a transformation into the iconic and the verbal.6 The garment itself is the mother tongue that must be translated into the image and the word. It is the translation of the garment into discourse that allows us as reader to understand the importance of a belt, a hemline, or a collar. Fashion, then, exists through narrative. The turquoise Maria Pinto dress worn at the Democratic convention became the fulcrum for the change in the narrative about Michelle. Her speech at the convention was her official debut, her opportunity to craft a new image that countered the stereotypes that were applied to her. She was not a baby’s mama, or a black revolutionary, but an American mother who was raised in a family that believed in the American dream—hard work leads to success. This more palatable narrative was accompanied by a slim-fitting dress in a bold color that complimented Michelle’s shape and skin color perfectly. Michelle as fashion icon was born. Suddenly all the media could talk about was what she wore. A new narrative was built that told the story of Michelle as the ultimate American middle-class dream: a young girl who worked hard, went to the best schools, got a great job, met an excellent man, had two beautiful children, and still has time to shop for beautiful clothes and get her hair and nails done regularly. She is the woman in the fashion magazines come to life and we don’t even hate her for it. We don’t hate her because, once again, she is very cautious about how she presents herself as a fashion role model, as well. She acknowledges her physical flaws and plays to her strengths. It is not by accident that she favors belts, sleeveless tops and full and straight skirts to the knee. All of these choices accentuate the positives of her body type and not in a necessarily high fashion way, but more in a “What Not to Wear” way. In other words, these are fashion decisions that any woman can make because they are about a woman’s body as
8 First Lady Fashion: How the U.S. Has Embraced Michelle Obama opposed to about the fashionable clothes. She is not a fashion model, like Carla Bruni, but a woman who is fashionable. In this era of personal makeover, she is a figure who makes fashion accessible by mixing high (Narciso Rodriguez) with low (J. Crew and the Gap), up and coming designers (Jason Wu) with quiet veterans (Isabel Toledo, Maria Pinto) and by using these choices as evidence that she is “comfortable” in her “own skin” and is having “fun with fashion.”7 André Leon Tally, of Vogue, describes her style in contrast to the more glamorous Jackie Kennedy as pragmatic.8 It is this pragmatism that makes her so popular today while the American economy is in crisis and the country is still trying to get used to a black president. Her practice of rewearing clothes is also a testimony to that pragmatism. The Michelle Obama Fashion and Style blog regularly reports the first lady’s reuse of accessories and dresses; a practice frowned upon by stars on the red carpet, but embraced by an administration that wants to let the country know that it in some way understands the nation’s financial burden. For the fashionistas who follow Michelle, however, her repetition of clothing gives them a true intimacy with her closet. It becomes a real space in which her clothes, unlike the celebrity closet that continually produces new clothes in a perpetual stream. In spite of all its positive attributes, this closet has had one key criticism that, of course, returns us to the question of race. In an article on theRoot.com, Leslie Morgan Steiner, a white American writer, criticizes Michelle Obama’s closet for being too “white.” Although she admits that all women of the class that Michelle represents often wear the same outfits that we see on the first lady, she argues that these clothes still symbolize a white culture that is more acceptable to the white voters who supported Obama.9 Her decision to leave her job and become the “Mom-in-Chief” furthers whitens her because it, just like her cardigan twin sets, represents the supposed white ideal of the stay-at-home mother as the basis for a stable family. Steiner’s critique amounts to a simplistic reversal of the previous accusations that Michelle was “too black”; now her clothes
Alisa K. Braithwaite 9 make her too white. By coding Michelle’s clothes as white, Steiner misses the many complex layers involved in the image that Michelle portrays. Although race is a clear factor in Michelle’s self-fashioning, it is far from the only or even the most important factor. What is at issue here is the first lady’s Americanness and her choice in clothing reinforces that. The blackness of her skin, however, also suggests that what is American in style is not necessarily white in color. To say it simply, she is not dressing like a white woman, she is dressing like an American woman, and it is about time for American as a term to stop being used as a synonym for white. Michelle Obama’s fashion has become a key part of the new image created for her because of its relation to the American dream narrative that has now become her story. It is important to return to this narrative to understand why her clothes work so well. In her essay “Revolutionary Black Women,” hooks lamented the attachment to a narrative of victimization that she found among her black female colleagues: I came away wondering why it was these black women could only feel bonded to each other if our narratives echoed, only if we were telling the same story of shared pain and victimization. Why was it impossible to speak an identity emerging from a different location?10 hooks questions why narratives about strength from resistance, or narratives about healthy black families continue to be rejected. It is this diversity of narratives that she believes will help alter the image of blacks in the United States. When Michelle was first noticed during her husband’s campaign, it seemed that she, too, was caught in a similar narrative of victimization. Somehow the country had failed her and that was where her lack of pride came from. This failure meant that she was in opposition to the country and therefore un-American. But there was space to consider her un-American because of her blackness.
10 First Lady Fashion: How the U.S. Has Embraced Michelle Obama One of the key issues about race in this country is the fact that to be American is coded as being white. Those who live in the United States and are not white have their Americanness qualified – they are African American, Asian American, Latino American – but whites in this country are just American. In order to regain her Americanness, she needed to alter her narrative. She was no longer a woman angry at a country that still considered people of her race to be outsiders. Instead, she was a woman who used the advantages that this country ostensibly offers to all Americans to excel. Her ability to excel, her ability to fashion herself into an example of what constitutes the American dream is represented in her clothes. Her clothes, designed by individuals both young and old, both high fashion and commercial, both natural born and immigrant, and from a variety of ethnic groups represent the dream of America that our country holds to so dearly for its stability. We need to believe that on some level we are this open and accepting or are constantly approaching this level of openness in order for the center to hold. Yet, at the same time that Michelle makes this dream real through her narrative of her clothes, she constantly reminds us that the protagonist of this story is black. She reminds us, also, that she is not an exception, but a norm for the middle-class black communities that she represents. In this way she subtly resists the presumption that her life, her clothes, her husband’s position, equals whiteness. What it equals is American and American comes in many colors. In spite of this celebratory narrative, I must end with one caveat. Although I greatly appreciate the image of Michelle Obama and her efforts to convince us of how she is multiplied throughout this country (as in the end of Spike Lee’s Malcolm X I wish to declare that I, too, am Michelle Obama), I am still made uneasy by the fact that when she seemed most resistant, admitting a lack of pride in a country that truly had betrayed many of her people, she also appeared to be the least beautiful. Why could we not notice her striking figure, her well-chosen outfits, her flare for accessories, when she was saying
Alisa K. Braithwaite 11 something we didn’t want to hear? Does this mean, then, that for black women to be beautiful, to be stylish, to be fashionable, they must also be accommodating? Hopefully we can still consider Michelle’s accommodation as merely one way of being. If we take the advice that she herself offers, we can begin to focus on the diversity of representations for black women in the United States. Although we may all have begun to wear cardigans, there are so many different kinds from which to choose. 1 Notes Kim McLarin, "The Real Prize: Why Obama's Wife Makes Me Love Him More," theRoot.com(2008). 2 "Michelle Obama Takes Heat for Saying She's "Proud of My Country" For the First Time," FOXNews.com(2008). 3 bell hooks, Black Looks: Race and Representation (Boston: South End Press, 1992), 6. 4 Angela Burt-Murray, "A Mother's Love," Essence, May 2009, 113. 5 Ibid. 6 Roland Barthes, The Fashion System, trans. Matthew Ward and Richard Howard (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), 5-6. 7 André Leon Tally, "Leading Lady," Vogue, March 2009, 431. 8 Ibid. 9 Leslie Morgan Steiner, "How Michelle Obama Passed for White," theRoot.com(2008), http://www.theroot.com/views/how-michelle- obama-passed-white. 10 bell hooks, Black Looks: Race and Representation (Boston: South End Press, 1992), 45. Bibliography Alisa K. Braithwaite is currently an assistant professor of literature at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She researches and writes about contemporary Caribbean writers and is currently developing a project on Caribbean science fiction. She is also an ardent follower of fashion and style and teaches a course on the subject.
You can also read