It may have been good for the soul that those who were watching and waiting to see what Michelle Obama would wear for the Commander-in-Chief Inaugural Ball first got to see a video of our troops in Kandahar talking to the President, who was already onstage in white tie—if only to give the eager viewers time to collect themselves. Obama had all but teased them when he’d greeted the crowd. “Now, those of you who are in uniform, you look outstanding. Your dates do look better, though. I just want to point this out.” So where’s your date, Mr. President? First more tributes to service and a shout of “Rock of the Marne!” (the Third Infantry Division’s nickname). Then there she was, the First Lady in red.
We only got a glimpse before Obama started dancing with his wife, getting in the way of our view of the dress, but it was clear that she had succeeded—gathered halter straps, v-shaped back, and all. The worst one could say was that it was a little flouncy and not as striking as the dress that Naeem Khan designed for the India state dinner. And then a greater revelation: Was a journalist ever as unabashedly excited about anything as CNN’s Alina Cho was about Michelle’s “extraordinary decision” to turn to the same designer twice—Jason Wu, who had, as an unknown, designed her dress for the first inaugural. Then, as now, Wu was surprised; the First Lady had a number of possibilities assembled, whether out of indecision or arranged as decoys. She had managed to suppress leaks without putting anyone in jail.
Inaugural dresses are not just casual cultural relics; not for any First Lady, and especially not for Michelle Obama. If her husband is a transformational figure, so is she. The dress worn to a first inaugural goes to the Smithsonian, and the one worn to a second goes to the National Archives. This is unfortunate for Hillary Clinton, since the dress she wore in 1993 was less nice than 1997’s, and represented a low from which the inaugural gown has only slowly made the steep ascent back. It involved purple lace, and otherwise defies description. (Clinton wore a pants suit on Monday.) Looking at that dress now makes one wonder about the nineties—or about how long the eighties lingered. It was worse than the dress that Rosalynn Carter recycled from a Georgia gubernatorial inaugural ball in 1977: that one has some retro appeal, a bit of Leia in Cloud City. Laura Bush, in red lace and then moony sparkles, wasn’t awful, but that’s all.
Michelle Obama with the designer Jason Wu, presenting her 2009 inaugural gown. Photographs courtesy of the Smithsonian.
Left: Hillary Clinton’s 1993 inaugural gown. Right: Laura Bush’s 2001 inaugural gown.
Nancy Reagan’s 1981 inaugural gown.
Rosalynn Carter’s 1977 inaugural gown.
The dress that Michelle Obama wore last night represented the full return of the inaugural gown from the realm of oddity—from being the high-necked, political version of whatever Cher or Jennifer Lopez wear to the Oscars. Her 2009 dress looked too much like a lesser, puffier version of Nancy Reagan’s, in 1981, to be a redeemer of the form. (In the spirit of bipartisanship, Nancy looked great.)
There was a debate about whether the color was “ruby” (Wu) or “persimmon” (the Times) and whether anyone could have seen that color coming, given the palette of purples and blues and silvers that Michelle Obama had costumed herself and her daughters in to present the family as a tableau at the swearing-in. For that, she wore a Thom Browne dress and a fitted coat with a steely sheen; Josh Marshall and others said that it looked like a Romulan dress uniform—which it did, but in a way that made one want to stop by the Alpha Quadrant to see what else the Romulans were wearing this year. At the parade, she glittered just enough, but the thought was that for the balls she’d be subdued. Instead, there was victory red.
As David Remnick noted, Michelle’s fashion discipline is such that her purple leather gloves coördinated with her daughters’ outfits. (There are fewer good things to say about her bangs.) Malia and Sasha wore J. Crew and Kate Spade, respectively; Sasha’s phone also wore a green frog case. Sadly, the girls didn’t get ball gowns, but that may be for the best: they were so compelling throughout the inaugural that our collective fascination may turn into obsession.
Jill Biden did wear blue; she was the Pippa of this operation, and looked it, in a slim Vera Wang dress. Given Joe Biden’s signals about running in 2016, we will see more of her, and so one might as well get used to it.
And so Michelle Obama’s inaugural dress is an important subject. To disagree is to dismiss the idea that politics involves theatre. But that is just for a start: fashion is also a field (and a business) that matters, and one that has reacted to the First Lady as a force rather than just as a customer. This is why the choice of Wu was a surprise, and, in some quarters, a disappointment: Shouldn’t someone else get a chance to attract investors? At the same time, there was, in the fashion press, something of a thrill at the definitiveness of it all: she believed in fashion, and she was committed.
Although it can be harder to talk about—if easier to feel—there is also the question of how she has confronted images of black women in American culture. Her first term was so successful that, unless one is a regular viewer of Fox News or a listener of Rush Limbaugh’s show—which still give her regular doses of hate—one could forget the resistance to having her in the White House. When her husband ran for President in 2008, there were barely veiled insinuations about whether the role of First Lady was really right for her—whether she was too angry, or could really feel comfortable. (One suspects that a sense of the pressures on her may explain why she is not taken to task as much as she might be for the price of these clothes.) Once, when she wore a red dress to a state dinner, she was accused of sympathizing with Communist China. Michelle might have responded to that, as many women in similar, if less prominent, situations do, by being flawlessly proper—some unchallenged idea of ladylike, wearing dresses and suits and jewelry indistinguishable from Cindy McCain’s or Ann Romney’s. Or she could have affected dowdiness until getting to the point where, as Justice Sotomayor put it, ““They just can’t fire me over the earrings anymore.”
Sotomayor, who may not be much of one for fashion, includes a moment in her new memoir when she did fall in love with an item of clothing, after she got into Princeton and was told to get a raincoat. “There it was: glowing white with toggle buttons and a subtle flair of fake fur trim up the front and around the hood. As improbably white as a white couch, white as a blanket of snow on a college lawn,” she writes. The shop is more “upscale” than the ones she and her mother would normally go to, and when they ask if the coat can be ordered in her size, the clerk says, “Well, that would be a lot of trouble.”
One shouldn’t need to go to Princeton (as Michelle also did) to be treated with courtesy. But the story has more than one dimension. There is the matter of having the right thing to wear, and of asserting—and even demanding—recognition for what the right thing is for you. Fashion can be a fight, and one not so divorced from justice.
Michelle, at any rate, has won that battle, and done so with an approach that involved neither punctilious conformity nor withdrawal from the fight. She has managed to be both something new and someone, from a fashion perspective, nearly irreproachable. And it would be wrong to say that it is entirely separate from the confidence that has carried her through four years of work on childhood obesity and military families—well received work, despite Fox’s worries about her telling people what to eat. Obama wasn’t thinking of those voices at the inaugural ball. “I’m just lucky to have her,” he said. “Some may dispute the quality of our President, but nobody disputes the quality of our First Lady.” And then they began to dance.
Photograph by Mario Tama/Getty.
