Just Like Fashion It’s A Passion For The With It And Hip
The Times gins up some page views compares Michelle Obama’s and Sarah Palin’s style. In making the two women a focal point for the year, the piece veers from lists of peripherally related issues to what their choices seem to typify so that initially it’s hard to find a main idea other than: look! (Poor Cindy McCain. No style piece for you).
For some reason, both the Times and I think of Michelle by first name and Palin by last name (check the file names for the slide shows).
Both women look terrific. But as the article goes on, it decides that it feels antagonistic towards Michelle. Of her choices in labels it says:
[They] are all insider, apart from her shorts and those strategically worn plebe numbers from Target and Talbots. If she got any more insider, she’d be backing down a runway. She wears Rodarte, Jason Wu, Sophie Theallet, Narciso Rodriguez, Thakoon, Isabel Toledo and Rick Owens, labels that in terms of creativity and price are at the highest level of fashion. Go much higher and you hit couture.
Sly writing, relying on a winked shared assumption (insider=bad) without offering a rationale. There are the kind of ‘insider’ things that make no sense without a reference point (4chan jokes, for example), and there are the kind of ‘insider’ things that those on the outside may not know or care that they’re missing. And maybe Michelle likes to showcase up-and-coming designers. But no:
Is this how a modern, educated, working woman wants to be viewed in her first historic year — as a maven, an icon? Who’s Barbie now?
Why are Michelle’s dress-down clothes “strategically worn plebe numbers” while Sarah “comes across as a businesslike everywoman… the way a lot women would like to dress, and probably do, when they don’t have time or many choices”? (Sounds a lot like…. Talbots). Post book-deal, Sarah presumably has more to spend on her wardrobe than most ‘everywomen’ make in a year. As for her look on the campaign trail, give most women $150,000 to spend on stylists and Neiman Marcus and they’ll come out looking pretty great.
‘Everywoman’ is language straight out of Sarah’s “Joe six-pack,” “hockeymom” playbook, a label left undefined so we can fill it in with our assumptions and associations without stopping to bother with any pesky facts. But the slant—icon bad, everywoman good—is clear.
It brings it all back, what we were only three and a half million votes away from four more years of.
Barack was much-mocked this summer for his amazingly consistent smile in U.N. meet and greets. It was reminiscent of the “lightheaded meanness” heaped on the Clintons in the 90s—a luxury, to be able to make fun so carelessly, or to compare Barack to Spock, as boys at a frat party Maureen Dowd did. In the Times’ slideshow of Michelle I see nothing Spock-like or put-on about the way Barack looks at her, and nothing insider about her look. And I don’t need to read the fashion press to know that she looks great.
Photo: From left to right: Jason Reed/Reuters; Justin Lane/EPA; Ellen Ozier/Reuters
