Michelle Obama’s new book, “The Look,” is a lot of things.
It is an Amazon best seller. It is a glossy photo book full of fashion. It is the story of the expectations that were heaped upon the first Black first lady. And it is the third installment of a trilogy of books by Mrs. Obama that focus on self-realization, including her memoir, her advice book on overcoming adversity and, this time, a meditation on the power of clothes.
But most of all it is a historical document, capturing a pivotal moment in the evolution of the role of first lady when clothing became a key part of communication. When, in other words, dress became an officially recognized part of the job. That’s a bigger deal than it might appear.
Mrs. Obama was, after all, the first first lady to have a stylist — or “valet,” as Meredith Koop was called — on the East Wing payroll, one employed to help define the visual strategy of the first lady for every occasion, from public hula hooping to major moments of pageantry.
Before the Obamas entered the White House, first ladies like Jacqueline Kennedy, Nancy Reagan and Hillary Clinton may have worked with a designer on their dresses for inaugural balls or state dinners, but the relationship was more grace and favor than structural. It was more about pageantry and propriety than diplomacy, and the first ladies tended to choose one designer (Oleg Cassini, James Galanos, Oscar de la Renta) and stick with him.
After Mrs. Obama, however, Melania Trump and Jill Biden each employed a stylist — Hervé Pierre for Mrs. Trump and Bailey Moon for Dr. Biden — who served as a liaison between fashion brands and the East Wing. They worked with many designers, for pretty much every occasion, often with a specific set of political priorities in mind. A new template had been created, and it became the norm.
Why that happened is, in large part, the subtext of “The Look,” which was released by Crown last week, and it is why the book matters. It lays bare, in an unprecedented (and easy-to-read) way, how a wardrobe was transformed into a vehicle of soft political power.
In some ways, it was unavoidable.
As the first Black first lady, Mrs. Obama knew that her every move was sure to be scrutinized, including every outfit. She had to represent all sides of a fractious country, and she had to do it as the first first lady of the social media age. The ability of the world to see and track her every appearance was far greater than it had ever been, and the ability of the world to comment on her every appearance was also greater. Her image — the pictures making their way around Instagram and Twitter and Facebook — mattered in a way it never had before, and thus the choices involved with creating that image mattered. The stakes had changed when it came to clothes.
As Mrs. Obama admits in the book. There had been speculation about the purpose behind many of her fashion choices as first lady in a number of books, including “Everyday Icon” by Kate Betts and “Michelle Obama: First Lady of Fashion and Style” by Susan Swimmer (not to mention in numerous articles by critics like me). But this is the first time she has overtly addressed the subject of her style and credited the team — Ms. Koop, the stylist; the hairdressers Yene Damtew and Njeri Radway; the makeup artist Carl Ray — that helped make it happen.
Thus, she writes, the decision to choose Jason Wu, then a young, relatively unknown Taiwanese-born New York designer, to design her inaugural gown was about demonstrating “that I was going to champion people and voices and talents that were too often overlooked.”
Ones who, she went on, “represented the diverse talent of American fashion design that I wanted to showcase to the world.”
Thus the approximately 100 different looks from Mrs. Obama’s time as first lady memorialized in “The Look,” not counting what she wore during the campaigns or after the Obamas left the White House. That’s a lot of clothing for one woman to wear, or shop for, in only eight years.
Especially when the criteria for each look being chosen also included diplomatic outreach, as when Mrs. Obama turned to a designer whose background bridged the United States and one of its allies for a state dinner or visit — all the better to, as she writes, “pay respect.” (See, for example, the dress by Tom Ford, an American designer working in London, that she wore during her state visit to Britain; or the gown by Versace, the Italian brand, she wore for the Italy state dinner.)
Especially when there were also practical concerns to take into consideration — not just the mores of different countries, but the fact that Mrs. Obama’s clothes couldn’t restrict her movement, had to allow her to hug someone if desired and had to be invulnerable to makeup that might rub off during contact.
Though Mrs. Obama writes about all of that in “The Look,” as well as the often racist criticism she received for wearing sleeveless dresses, one subject she avoids is cost. She does note that she tried to introduce “affordable but fashionable brands into my closet,” including J. Crew, but there’s no avoiding the fact that acquiring this many outfits is an enormous expense — a burden borne by the first family, not the state. One of the ways this cost is managed is for a designer to “gift” an outfit for a major public event to the country, which means that while the first lady may wear a gown once or twice, it goes into the national archive or a presidential library rather than her closet.
Still, that doesn’t change the takeaway of “The Look.” Just how much Mrs. Obama adapted her own style to the style she felt the country needed became obvious once she left the White House, with her subsequent book tours and related fashion experiments. A Canadian tuxedo! Thigh-high Balenciaga boots! Straight-from-the-runway Chanel!
And that further underscores the point of this book: For any first lady selecting the (many) garments that will define her tenure is not something that happens by accident. Nor should it be: It’s work.
Vanessa Friedman has been the fashion director and chief fashion critic for The Times since 2014.
The post Michelle Obama’s New Book Is a Historical Document Dressed Up as a Coffee-Table Tome appeared first on New York Times.
