Michelle Obama's Smart Sensuality Style Says "Flip It" to Modern Fashionistas

USA Today recently ran a feature on Michelle Obama's unique fashion style. In commenting on how Michelle dresses, writer Maria Puente defines fashion for Smart Sensuality women.

'Sexy' and 'nurturing' are not descriptors typically appearing together, to discuss a fashion icon. Michelle has changed that.

If you follow fashion, we are living through a moment where the Moderns and Cultural Creatives are being clearly defined around values-driven style and behavior.

The Smart Sensuality woman is the intersection of the best of these two values sets.

Susan Swimmer, fashion features editor of More magazine and author of Michelle Obama: First Lady of Fashion and Style, says: "It's wonderful to see a woman can be smart and like fashion."

Mandi Norwood, author of Michelle Style: Celebrating the First Lady of Fashion, also defines the First Lady's Smart Sensuality style, commenting on the purple Maria Pinto sheath dress, we all know and love. It's one of my favorite Michelle Obama looks, as well:

"It encapsulates everything about her: fit and professional, sexy and revealing, strong and feminine, classic and modern, nurturing and authoritative," Norwood says. "It pulls together the extremes of her personality to put together a modern woman."

The SS woman doesn't wear Cultural Creative Birkenstocks, although Michelle could turn this statement on its head in an instant. If she was a 70s wild child, she may well find herself today, in a tailored sheath dress, working in corporate America.

Like Michelle Obama -- and unlike the Modern woman -- the SS may already have left corporate America for a lower-paying job in the public sector or a nonprofit.

Wherever she is professionally and like Michelle, the Smart Sensuality woman does not believe that she is defined by brands and fashion -- or the fashion press; nor does she believe that the woman with the most toys wins.

In the last decade, we've seen brands move out and embrace breast cancer. Yellow ribbons, red and pink ones, wrist bands have emerged as a fashion accessory. I'm not suggesting that fashion hasn't supported causes in the past. But overall, fashion and style have been largely superficial in their customer relationships.

Women emulated brands and were defined by them. Brands drove the fashion dialogue. Confident Smart Sensuality women don't buy into that proposition.

Michelle Obama and Smart Sensuality women generally take a reverse approach. They are true to themselves as women and look for style that expresses their mood of the moment, the totality of who they are as women.

Celebrity rag powerhouse Bonnie Fuller has taken to rating Michelle's fashion sense, giving her a B+ for her April European tour. (Factualy, Bonnie has given Michelle many As.)

HER EUROPEAN TOUR: B+

This should have been a no-brainer run of A++'s. Instead it was marred by a few unfortunate fashion choices — skirts that emphasized her wide, womanly hips too much, a head-scratching form-shortening bust belt and a too-casual funereal black outfit to meet the Queen. But the only D on the First Lady's 100 day report card — putting her arm around the Queen. It wasn't a booboo as in bad manners to touch the Queen. If anything, it was wonderful of her to be so enthusiastically American. The D was for distraction. Just by doing it, Michelle became a distraction in the press at a time when her husband and other leaders had way more important issues to focus on.

Bonnie Fuller, 2006 interviewed by NYTimesIn all honesty, Smart Sensuality women read Fuller's comments as drivel. I won't write what really goes through our minds.

Don't you have something stylishly relevant to worry about, Bonnie, besides GRADING Michelle Obama? Fuller's is a Modern woman's mentality about style, a feline-like (sorry cat lovers) attitude that nips at women's confidence.

Obviously, Michelle considers Fuller's comments drivel also, because she continues to wear many of the same looks -- like emphasizing her womanly hips -- in spite of Fuller's direction to "stop it, FLOTUS".

Michelle Obama will make her own fashion decisions, thanks. She's tired of self-important fashionistas undermining women's confidence about the curves. (Read 2006 NYT Fuller interview.)

Embracing What Matters

America's First Lady is about empowerment for women, not enhancing our already eroded self-confidence. I'm curious if Bonnie Fuller believes she passes her own fashion Do tests.

Increasingly, the values, manufacturing practices, ads and marketing strategies behind brands will be evaluated by Smart Sensuality women, who DEMAND that fashion is socially relevant, as well as fun and stylish.

Modern women like Bonnie Fuller will continue to grade us, but growing numbers of Smart Sensuality women will say "Flip it, Bonnie; I may love fashion, but I've got more important things to worry about". Anne

Comments

[Cynthia at A Shimmy In My Spirit]

So glad to see a blog featuring Michelle Obama. I love her style!

ashimmyinmyspirit.com