Less Fashion, More Substance

By now, it’s become almost inevitable: You go online, you try—really try—to read something worthwhile about the health-care debate, or Iran, or even something as innocuous as just how much money the famed photographer Annie Leibovitz actually owes. But then, inexplicably, you find yourself clicking through a slideshow about Michelle Obama’s summer wardrobe, and it all goes downhill from there.

The reason that you end up browsing these pieces about the First Lady is not that you’re actually curious about what the woman wears or really about anything having to do with her. You just subconsciously select the easiest, flashiest item on the screen—and these are usually the ones about Michelle Obama.

I would sound crazy if I claimed that there is therefore a giant media conspiracy to channel undue public attention onto the president’s otherwise normal wife. But I would sound even crazier if I said that I have seen all these pictures without having been forced to do so against my will. Call me crazy, but it seems clear that many major media organizations are doing their part to cast Michelle Obama in a certain mold, one into which she shouldn’t necessarily have to fit—the fashion maven and the cultural arbiter, the trendsetter and the globetrotter, the American queen and world icon.

In other words, another Jacqueline Kennedy.

The urge to compare the two women is natural enough, especially given that Barack Obama won the same sort of transformative, generational election in 2008 that John F. Kennedy ’40 won in 1960. Nor is Michelle Obama the first presidential spouse to be a media darling or even an object of national interest. Hillary Clinton, before her infamous health-care debacle in 1993, was similarly fawned over, and Nancy Reagan, with those ever-useful horoscopes, never failed to amuse.

But while it’s always been a peculiar fact that the American people love and crave the same type of royalty their republic was created to reject, there is certainly something different about the way the media treats the current First Lady. Unlike Lady Bird, Pat, Betty, Rosalynn, Nancy, Barbara, Hillary, and Laura before her, Michelle is not just another political wife to be scrutinized excessively—she has been assigned the Jackie mystique, forced to represent the reincarnation of Camelot when she is in fact an emblem of an entirely different sort of era—our own.

Frankly, Michelle Obama is not Jackie Kennedy. She was not born into the East Coast establishment, her blood does not run blue, and her upbringing was not centered on landing a powerful husband. She has a law degree from Harvard, out-earned her husband before he ran for public office, and has children and a family she still manages to care for. If First Ladies can be said to represent anything at all—and the judges are still out on that one—then Michelle Obama would seem to represent some version of the modern American woman, the woman who is fully engaged in each aspects of her life and who deserves a much broader definition than something as trivial as wardrobe alone, and a J.Crew wardrobe at that. Yet the media would have her transformed into another fashion icon or, as Vogue’s André Leon Talley said recently, “the most fashionable woman in America.”
As if her fashion sense were the sole characteristic that defined her.

I will not pretend that I alone know what “defines” Michelle Obama, but the point is that the media should present her as she is rather than paint her as some post-Camelot American queen. If we are still to be barraged with news about the First Lady—and I’m not sure we should be—then, instead of the outfits, let us see the truth.


James K. McAuley ’12, a Crimson editorial writer, lives in Currier House.