First Lady Fashion: How the U.S. Has Embraced Michelle Obama

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.