Free Speech: Hadley Freeman Explores The New Epidemic Of First Lady Fashion Fever: Style.com

Quoted via Style.com

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With Michelle, we have a woman who is sufficiently confident in her intelligence, career, and personal status to know that enjoying how she looks will not signify that she is a bubblehead. So what should she wear on January 20, then? Well, newspaper reports are already claiming, unsurprisingly, that designers are nigh on falling over themselves to get her their wares. The comparisons between her and Jackie O are really just about their shared interest in style—their respective styles are actually very different. Jackie—and I don’t mean this as a bad thing—took a guaranteed, even safe approach to chic: She knew the conservative shapes that suited her and she worked them. Michelle fearlessly goes for something a little more awkward and, as a result, looks far more independent and modern and cool and appealing to women. This is not a gal to get out the cleavage. On the other hand, she doesn’t feel she has to wear a Comme des Garçons hunchback dress to prove her fashion-aware-but-still-cerebral credentials. Think of the red and black Narciso Rodriguez affair she wore the night of the election: not my cup of tea, personally, but you gotta admire a woman who worked such a number on the international stage. more