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Judith Thurman, who wrote a profile of Isabel Toledo and her husband Ruben in The New Yorker two years ago, has this touching postscript on Michelle's Inauguration Day frock:
Since the whole occasion is so fraught with symbolism, I think that the choice of Isabel was particularly apt. She and Ruben are Latinos—from Cuba—who grew up in working-class families. They and the Obamas belong to the same generation. Ruben described himself to me (before Obama famously did) as a “mutt.” America gave them a chance, and they made the best of it. When Obama spoke, this morning, about the “makers” who work with their hands, and who have built America, he might have been thinking of the Toledos. They are also independent entrepreneurs who have built a small business, which has suffered its ups and downs, but they hang in. And like the Obamas, they’re an unusually devoted couple.
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Julia and Dana, though Michelle Obama looked bold and resplendent in her pale yellow chartreuse Isabel Toledo frock and matching coat, I think we can all agree that Aretha Franklin stole the sartorial show with her enormous bedazzled bow-bedecked hat. Though the signature chapeau might not work on most Washington women, the Queen of Soul really owned it. Or maybe I'm wrong, and Aretha's hat will be the D.C. accessory of the season, inspiring head coverings of Kentucky Derby proportions. Either way: Aretha for the win.
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In the absence of any "ask not what your country can do for you"-grade catchphrase from Obama's speech (though I did love that flight of rhetoric at the end comparing our nation's current moment to winter in Valley Forge), can I free-associate about Michelle's dress and coat (which, as Julia points out, come from edgy Cuban-American designer Isabel Toledo)? What was most remarkable about her outfit was how unpolitically coded it seemed. It didn't quote any former first lady (no Reagan red, no Jackie Kennedy pillbox or cinched waist, no Democratic blue or bringing-it-together purple). The color was utterly weird and daring, a chartreuse-y yellow which, while it looked great with her coloring and the forest-green gloves she had on, seemed to carry no intrinsic message besides "I look awesome in this." Newsday would have it that, since Elizabethan times, yellow has symbolized hope, but this was no sunshine-y, baby-duck, Easter-morning yellow—it had an almost unsettling greenish cast, like absinthe, which set it apart from the wholesome primary colors seen on the other women on the podium (poet Elizabeth Alexander's red suit, Hillary's blue coat). To me, that dress was a reassuring message for those (including some of us here) who've feared that Michelle will have to disappear into bland First Ladydom.
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Women's Wear Daily just reported that Michelle Obama will wear Isabel Toledo to Obama's swearing-in this morning. Add Toledo to the list of "Surprisingly Avant Garde Designers Our First Lady Likes." When she took over as creative director of troubled sportswear label Anne Klein a few years ago—an appointment that proved short-lived—Slate fashion critic Josh Patner noted that her work "often had a whisper of kinky seduction grounded in fine technique. Her jersey dresses twisted like serpents around the body. Silk skirts were hitched up at the hips with tiny metal loops; slashes in jersey dresses revealed the less obvious, and therefore more erotic, zones of the clavicle or rib cage." Sounds chilly for a day like today!
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