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Women's Wear Daily has commissioned fashion designers from Betsey Johnson to Peter Som to imagine outfits Michelle Obama might wear to the inauguration. The resulting slide show, published on Monday, is full of sumptuous looks: I favor the clean lines of Isaac Mizrahi's sorbet-colored gown and the sparkly white kimono envisaged by Diane Von Furstenberg. (Monique Lhuillier should keep her superfluous ruffles on the red carpet, if you ask me.) But paging through the entries, I was struck by how incapable the world's top fashion designers are of sketching Michelle. The fashion world is notoriously inhospitable to black women—if Michelle Obama lands the cover of Vogue, as has been rumored, she’ll be one of the few black nonmodels ever to grace it—but these sketches suggest a discomfort with blackness that’s truly startling. Check out Karl Lagerfeld's “Mrs. Obama”: Leaning heavily on the peach cray-pas, he produces a woman who looks more like Jackie Kennedy than Michelle. Badgley Mischka’s Michelle is a buff-colored, collagen-lipped blank; Michael Kors goes for bronze; Marc Jacobs and Koi Suwannagate both produce sketches with recognizably Michelle-shaped hair but skin that registers somewhere between alabaster and geisha. Of course, fashion sketches are stylized, not representational, which gives these designers plenty of wiggle room. (This may or may not explain why Zac Posen’s Michelle looks like a dying guppy.) But still: Is it so hard to draw a woman with black skin?