Michelle Obama’s fashion diplomacy shines at new the Obama Presidential Center. Bobbi Brown chats about bringing Jones Road to the West Coast. Dataland in DTLA rivals Walt Disney’s “Fantasia.” And the boys are back on the runway in Milan and Paris.
Michelle Obama’s Fashion Diplomacy Shines in Chicago
The star-packed opening of the new Obama Presidential Center in Chicago was a nostalgia trip in the best way. The museum celebrates the impact of both Barack and Michelle Obama, including the former first lady’s use of fashion diplomacy during her years in the White House and afterward. Working with her longtime stylist Meredith Koop, who may be the best in the business, Michelle Obama has embraced a wide range of diverse designers and used clothing as a sophisticated tool for communication and symbolism.
That skill was on full display during the Obama Center’s opening weekend, when she brought her late mother, Marian Robinson, along for the journey, sartorially speaking. Michelle Obama wore a custom Acne Studios pencil skirt featuring a portrait of Robinson, who was a fixture of the first family’s home life during the presidency, living at the White House for all eight years and helping raise Sasha and Malia Obama.
“Everybody in our lives was touched by mom. It broke Barack down because he hadn’t seen the skirt,” Michelle Obama told Michele Norris on MS NOW, explaining that it took a while for the former president to compose himself onstage after seeing it. “I had gotten emotionally accustomed to the beauty of it … I should have prepped him …”
Later in the weekend, Michelle Obama nodded to the Thom Browne coat dress she wore for the second inauguration in 2013, opening the new museum in a Thom Browne navy-and-white seersucker cropped sack jacket with a matching skirt, white cotton piqué corset and white wingtip pumps. At other events, her choices were equally thoughtful and distinctly American in spirit; she wore a black dress by French brand Celine, currently designed by American Michael Rider, and a black peplum top with a white silk skirt by buzzy New York label Fforme, designed by Frances Howie.
The museum’s exhibitions stretch from the Declaration of Independence through the fight for women’s suffrage, the Civil Rights Movement and other milestones in the ongoing pursuit of equality.
The narrative also focuses on Barack Obama’s presidency and life in the White House, including a full-scale replica of the Oval Office as it appeared during the Obama administration and a showcase featuring 12 of Michelle Obama’s most iconic dresses.
Included is the dress from election night in 2008, by Cuban-American designer Narciso Rodriguez, which I wrote at the time was “a major statement, the patriotic red bursting out of black like a firecracker out of the night sky.” It was a taste of what was to come from the first lady, who consistently supported young American fashion designers.
Together with Koop, she often chose symbolic looks in which the color or designer was intended to make a statement, such as the Tom Ford white halter gown on display, which she wore to a state dinner hosted by Queen Elizabeth II at Buckingham Palace in 2011 — a nod to the American designer living and working in London at the time.
For her final White House State Dinner in October 2016, Michelle Obama chose a custom rose-gold chain-mail gown designed by Atelier Versace. Honoring the guests of honor — Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi and his wife, Agnese Landini — the goddess-like look celebrated Italian craftsmanship.
The museum also displays the colorful geometric-print halter dress Michelle Obama wore for her official portrait painted by artist Amy Sherald.
It was designed by Michelle Smith of Milly, an American contemporary brand that FLOTUS turned to often. “It is a people’s fabric. The dress has pockets. It is easy and comfortable,” Smith said at the time. “The dress speaks to the confidence, warmth and realness of Michelle Obama.”
Jones Road Opens in Santa Monica
Bobbi Brown needs no introduction. She revolutionized the beauty world in the 1990s by creating the “no-makeup” makeup look and building an empire around it. Now she has landed on the West Coast, opening her first Jones Road store on Montana Avenue in Santa Monica.
Brown founded the brand five and a half years ago, in the midst of the pandemic and on the exact day her 25-year noncompete agreement with Estée Lauder, the owner of her namesake brand, expired. I am a huge fan of the brand and am elated that I can now shop it in person closer to home. I recently had the chance to chat with the beauty legend about her vision, her retail rollout and her summer beauty tips. “I’d left one company not thinking I would ever go back and do what I did before, because there couldn’t possibly be another chapter,” Brown told WrapStyle. But she was swept up in what was happening in beauty in the early 2020s, when brands began circumventing the department store model, and launching direct to consumer.
“Plus, I really started wearing different kinds of makeup and really caring about ingredients,” she added. “I was dipping my toe into a lot of the new clean brands but being a little bit disappointed at the efficacy. So, I saw that there was something that I could create that didn’t exist, and I started Jones Road with a simple philosophy that you don’t need a lot, you just need the right things.”
From the beginning, her hero product has been the Miracle Balm because “no one had ever seen anything like it,” she said. “And it was this product that was a happy accident. Instantly when I put it on, I said, this is a miracle. It came without color in it at first, and I saw what it did to my skin, but then I said, ‘Well, what if we tinted it,’ and so we did. People still weren’t wearing a lot of foundation during the pandemic, so this was unbelievable. And you could put it on your lips, you could put it on your eyes, and your hair, on your body.”
Another must-have is What the Foundation. “I couldn’t have named it that at my old company,” she laughed, referring to parent brand Estée Lauder.
Next up is a full-coverage concealer, coming on the heels of the new Bright Skin Illuminating Drops, which Brown likens to “vacation skin in a bottle.”
“If you’re in a place that is high humidity, and California is not high humidity, you should not be putting What the Foundation or Miracle Balm on, even if you’re super dry, because it’s just going to be sticky,” she said.
“You could mix Bright Skin Drops with your moisturizer and put it on your cheeks for a bit of brightening,” she suggested. “Something else that’s great for the summer is the gel liner, which is a long wear lining product for the eyes. It’s not going to smear and stays put. Even our mascara gets eight-hour wear. I’d recommend things that just stay on and you don’t have to think about.”
With more than 40 years in the industry, it’s remarkable that Brown is still enjoying it.
What’s different now is, “I am very in touch with my customer, which I certainly wasn’t before,” she said of her digital community and de facto focus group. “We have a Jones Road Facebook group called the Roadies. Last I looked, there was 90,000 members.”
When the brand exploded digitally, Brown wasn’t thinking about brick-and-mortar stores — until her husband, a real estate developer, found a cool building in her hometown of Montclair, N.J. It became her first store, which opened during the pandemic. “People were lined up around the block to get in, because you know, four people at a time, everyone had masks on, people were coming from all over the globe and all over the Tri-State area,” she said.
In addition to the Santa Monica store, Brown is opening three other California stores this year in Palo Alto, Newport Beach and San Diego, which will bring the total store count to 20 by the end of the year.
“I’m in my late 60s, and I had dinner with friends of mine who asked if I was playing golf yet. No mahjong, no pickleball, no. What do I do? I have a Jones Road truck sitting outside my house, and I hop in it with a bunch of kids that I hired, college kids, and we give samples out, and talk to people, and we shoot content. I am having so much fun doing what I’m doing.”
She needs to get that truck out to L.A., maybe when she comes in September for a personal appearance at the store. Jones Road, 1406 Montana Ave., Santa Monica.
Dataland Brings AI to the Museum
Dataland, the first AI art museum, has opened in L.A., and it’s getting rave reviews from The New York Times and elsewhere, while flooding my feed with fantastical selfies the likes of which I haven’t seen since Yayoi Kusama’s “Infinity Mirror Rooms” opened at The Broad in 2015.
The museum is located in the Frank Gehry-designed L.A. Grand building in downtown L.A. and is a nod to the DTLA future depicted in Ridley Scott’s film “Blade Runner,” which co-founder Refik Anadol fell in love with at the age of 8.
The space is also across the street from Gehry’s Walt Disney Concert Hall, where, in 2018, Refik Anadol Studio presented one of its defining projects, “WDCH Dreams,” with machine-generated dreams of 100 years of L.A. Philharmonic performances mapped onto the silvery sides of the building.
With its inaugural exhibition, “Machine Dreams: Rainforest,” Dataland offers a multi-sensory experience, including chocolates from local confectioner Valerie and fragrance from L’Oréal, that continually evolves through human data collected from visitors.
The exhibition is powered by Refik Anadol Studio’s Large Nature Model, an AI system trained on one of the world’s largest ethically sourced collections of ecological data. Visitors can connect to the museum through two wearable devices — a medical-grade biosensor worn on the wrist that captures physiological responses in real time, including heart rate and skin temperature, among others — or a device worn around the neck that delivers a scent journey by L’Oréal.
Established in 2014 by Refik Anadol, a pioneer in the aesthetics of data and machine intelligence whose work has been exhibited in museums globally, and artist and entrepreneur Efsun Erkılıç, the Los Angeles-based Refik Anadol Studio produces immersive media art using data as its primary material and AI as a collaborator.
Across five galleries spanning 25,000 square feet, the museum takes you through machine-generated environments inspired by real-world rain forests. Highlights include an infinity room of a different sort, where Anadol’s dream of a glass hummingbird takes flight in an LED cube; an architectural canvas called the Data Pavilion; and the Latent Gallery, where visitors can paint with a “thinking brush,” sample an edible sculpture, experience the sacred healing song of the Yawanawá people and encounter the scent of a flower that blooms only one night each year in the Amazon rainforest.
Walt Disney himself couldn’t have imagined anything so trippy. Then again, if you’ve seen “Fantasia,” maybe he did.
Dataland, 100 S. Grand Ave., Los Angeles (424) 443-3502.
The Boys Are Back
Pretty, preppy, beachy and skinny-mini the boys are back on the runways in Milan and Paris for the Spring 2027 menswear shows.
Temperatures have been soaring in Europe, and the A-lister contingent has been relatively sparse, save for Ralph Lauren’s stacked Milan front row, where David Lauren was flanked by Colman Domingo, Lewis Hamilton and Tom Hiddleston.
Saint Laurent followed that up in Paris with a Madonna moment, and Rami Malek, Austin Butler and Kate Moss managing to look cool in the historic heat.
On the runway, some design ideas seemed to carry over from the influential Dior and Chanel women’s collections, notably tricked-out jeans and piled-on costume jewelry.
For better or worse, the newsiest collection so far has been Prada’s, which brought back the early Aughts slimline look with skinny pants on even skinnier models that even in the age of Ozempic begged the question of responsible body representation on the runway. That said, I did like the “Matrix”-cool sunglasses.
“Vacanze Siciliane,” Dolce & Gabbana’s beach escape of a show with Adonis-like models, also had plenty of personality pants if you can call them that, but much more forgiving. I loved this collection, which was steeped in coral and shell details.
Dolce & Gabbana also set the bar for the new brooch, which has migrated from the red carpet to the everyday, also seen at Armani and Saint Laurent.
I loved all the novelty knitwear, especially the Ralph Lauren sweater sampling every design motif of the designer’s oeuvre, from Southwestern to equestrian, plaid to cottagecore.
And at Louis Vuitton, Pharrell Williams had the coolest set so far, bringing SoCal surf and skate culture to Cité Internationale Universitaire, complete with a giant artificial wave and models toting surfboards and pushing LV trunks resembling ice cream pushcarts at the beach.
The clothes were more restrained than in some of Williams’ past outings, which was a good thing. His version of the season’s embellished jeans featured shells arranged in the house’s Damier pattern (cute). And who wouldn’t smile at an LV rash guard?
Hang ten (thousand) dollars.
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