Everyday Icon - Michelle Obama and the Power of Style

296 Pages·2011·9.19 MB·English

by  Betts Kate

Copyright © 2011 by Kate Betts All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Clarkson Potter/Publishers, an imprint of the Crown Publishing
Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
www.crownpublishing.com
www.clarksonpotter.com
CLARKSON POTTER is a trademark and POTTER with colophon is a
registered trademark of Random House, Inc.
Cover photograph: Olivier Douliery/Getty Images Photograph and other credits
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Betts, Kate.
Everyday Icon: Michelle Obama and the power of style / Kate Betts.—1st ed.
p. cm.
1. Clothing and dress—United States. 2. Fashion—United States. 3. Women’s clothing—United
States. 4. Popular culture—United States. 5. Obama, Michelle, 1964–—Clothing. 6. Presidents’
spouses—Clothing—United States. I. Title.
GT615.B48 2011
973.932092—dc22 2010008895
eISBN: 978-0-30795266-0
v3.1
For my mother,
Glynne Robinson Betts
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
1 FIRST IMPRESSIONS
2 STYLE VERSUS SUBSTANCE
3 THE DRESSMAKERS’ DETAILS
4 THE EVERYDAY ICON
5 WELCOME TO THE WHITE HOUSE
6 ONLY CONNECT
7 FIND YOUR SPOT, FIND YOUR PLACE
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
NOTES
INDEX
INTRODUCTION
THIS BOOK IS about why style matters, and why in particular the style
of the new American First Lady Michelle Obama matters.
In many cultures—French, Italian, Russian, and Japanese, to name a
few—why style matters is self-evident and arguing in defense of it is like
arguing on behalf of music or art or even clean water and fresh air. But
Americans are ambivalent about style. We are by turns attracted to and
afraid of style, fascinated and suspicious. We confuse it with transient
fashion trends and logo-splashed clothes. Too often American women
subvert their sense of style and don a uniform instead. They play it safe
so as not to detract from their intellectual contributions. Style is
frivolous; style is for airheads. Tenacious conventions pit style against
substance and suggest we have to choose one or the other as a defining
focus or sensibility: you can work for shoes and bags or you can work for
world peace. But not both.
Somehow having style has come to be associated with the idea that
people can be judged solely on their appearance rather than, as Martin
Luther King Jr. famously remarked in another context, the content of
their character. Nothing could be further from the truth. Style is a part
of the content of one’s character.
Michelle Obama’s style matters, and one of the reasons she exemplifies
the power of style is that she is helping to liberate a generation of
women from the false idea that style and substance are mutually
exclusive. She reminds us that while style can certainly be expressed in
the way you look and what you wear, it is inextricably bound up in who
you are and what you believe in. It reflects your values. It bespeaks your
manners, your sense of occasion, your individuality and self-respect. It
also illuminates in the best sense your desire to make an impression,
your awareness of others and the community we share. Style, simply
put, is a civilizing force.
Michelle Obama would not have made such a strong impression on the
women of my generation if we had completely resolved the tensions of
substance and style. Both of us were born in 1964—the last year of the
baby boom—and benefited from the pioneers of feminism who came ten
and twenty years before us, women who shattered glass ceilings,
occupied corner offices, and delivered on the seemingly impossible
promise of having it all.
I got my aesthetic education like many kids growing up in New York
City in the early 1970s. Style, like language, was something you
absorbed unconsciously from the culture of the city itself. The style
classrooms of New York were the city’s streets and art galleries, its
nightclubs and rush-hour lobbies. New York then seemed full of
trailblazing women who were conquering new professional worlds with
their personal style in full bloom. Women like Barbara Walters reporting
on the Today show about Vietnam, Gloria Steinem starting Ms.
magazine, and Diane von Furstenberg launching her famous wrap dress.
Looking back I can see that one of the reasons they stood out was that
they were the exceptions not the rule. It wasn’t until I moved to Paris
that I was fully immersed in a culture that understood style was
substance, and that a lack of style could signal a deficit of substance.
Later I was inspired by the bravura motto of the legendary Harper’s
Bazaar editor Carmel Snow who called her muse “the well-dressed
woman with the well-dressed mind.” But time and again I would run up
against women who seemed more comfortable with style and substance
inhabiting two separate worlds.
As the generation led by the new First Lady consolidates and extends
the gains of its predecessors, American women still wrestle with the
question of appearance. We worry whether paying attention to what we
wear will automatically entitle people to disregard what we say or do.
We wonder whether the wrong outfit will violate some cultural no-fly
zone. The unwritten rules have certainly been relaxed over the decades
of feminist-driven change, but we are still confronted with having to
figure out what the rules are.
Striking the pose: At Princeton in February 1985, Michelle Robinson (at left), then a senior, modeled student-designed
fashions along with fellow student Kim Battle for a story in the Newark Star-Ledger.
Many years later as First Lady, Michelle Obama demonstrates the same innate sense of style as she greets sailors at the
Norfolk Naval Station in July 2009.
This, I think, is another reason why so many women are drawn to the
style of the woman in the White House. I’ve tried in this book to trace
the role Michelle Obama’s innate sense of style played in her journey
from the South Side of Chicago to Princeton to that dizzying inaugural
morning when she appeared before the world as an almost shockingly
sudden new icon of style. What the world saw in January 2009, and
many Americans had first glimpsed at the Democratic National
Convention in the summer of 2008, was already evident when the future
First Lady was a student at Princeton University in the early 1980s.
When a small group of black women students at the university decided
to put on a fashion show of clothes they’d sewn themselves, the first
person they asked to model was a statuesque junior then known as
Michelle Robinson. As a student she didn’t wear anything trendy—some
of her sleeveless dresses were remarkably similar to clothes she wears
now in the White House—but she carried herself with an athletic ease
and grace and seemed to have an implicit understanding of Coco
Chanel’s famous dictum: “Dress shabbily and they notice the dress; dress
impeccably and they notice the woman.”
Now in the White House, Michelle Obama is using her self-possessed
style to set the tone and to define a new etiquette of power. She
represents in many ways the fulfillment of the dreams millions of
mothers and grandmothers had for their daughters. She seems
remarkably unintimidated by traditions that have subjugated women for
centuries. She’s not afraid her dignity might be compromised by a
barefoot dash across the White House lawn. She’s not worried about
some scandalous breach of protocol when she spontaneously touches the
Queen of England. She has reached out to touch women from many
different backgrounds, high and low, rich and poor; women of many
ethnicities and creeds. Her gospel generally falls along the lines of
empowering women for what they might make of their lives. It is a
gospel that is rooted in the substance of style, a gospel that defines style
as knowing who you are and being unafraid to show it to the world.