The XX Factor: What women really think.

Add Jason Wu To the List...

Michelle Obama really is avoiding the First Lady fashion cliches (Oscar de la Renta, Escada), isn't she? With the debut of the ivory Jason Wu column Jessica wrote about tonight, we can add Wu's name, too, to the list of semi-obscure fashion names that average American women now know. (Is there a Target diffusion line in Wu's future?) Style.com pegs Wu as a designer who "has the immaculate Park Avenue thing down cold"; Michelle has been wearing his work since last year.

Love the feathery texture and the drapey skirt. Not as sure about the bridal color and the asymmetrical strap. What do you guys think? 

(Oh and Dayo, you're right that the men are stepping up their fashion game today: How'd you like Jay-Z's Urkel-ish glasses at the Neighborhood Ball? He pulls them off, no?)

Is Barack Obama Blacker Than Michelle?

A few weeks ago, I posted about Women’s Wear Daily’s gallery of inauguration looks for Michelle Obama. Many of the top designers who submitted sketches made Michelle look white, rendering her skin in cottonball hues. This week, WWD asked designers to envision what Barack should wear on January 20. The resulting sketches are much more representational—and much darker skinned—than those of Michelle. Sure, Marc Jacobs offers a stylized white blank, and Brioni’s sand-colored sketch looks like a Modigliani portrait of Little Richard. For the most part, though, there is a real sense of comfort with Obama’s skin color: The president-elect looks handsome, recognizable, and discernibly black in these sketches from Nautica and Brooks Brothers. Tommy Hilfiger also gives Obama brown skin (although, in an amusing act of ego, he adds a face that looks just like Tommy Hilfiger’s). There’s also a distinct vein of photo-realism here: Sketches from Ferragamo, Sean John, Turnbull and Asser, Richard James Savile Row, and Zegna all look uncannily like our prez-elect.

I wonder why designers rendered Barack more accurately than Michelle. It’s tempting to credit the fashion industry’s habit of ignoring black women, but fashion isn’t crawling with black men, either. The discrepancy may also be explained by fashion culture: Perhaps womenswear designers are expected to be fantastical while menswear designers (used to dealing with less imaginative clients) typically produce more prosaic sketches. But I suspect designers had fun incorporating Obama’s face into their sketches because—particularly on the Shepard Fairey-style posters that were ubiquitous this year—it’s become as familiar as a logo. Barack’s features and skin color are now as iconic, emblematic, and chic as the Chanel C's or the Lacoste ‘gator. Designers are thrilled to employ them.

Fashion Faux Pas

Julia, I too found some of the renderings of Michelle Obama questionable and also troubling because of their subtle use of stereotypical imagery. Christian Lacroix's Michelle is a sneering, mean-looking lady, much like the "angry black woman" the Obama haters accused Michellle Obama of being. Why is she frowning in every sketch? Doesn't she have every reason to be happy? After all, her husband is the soon-to-be leader of the free world. You'd think the new first lady is smile-challenged. Same goes for Zak Posen's scowling, slouching Michelle, an obviously sullen black woman. They might as well have thrown in the controversial New Yorker cover sketch of Michelle as black militant for good measure. Betsy Johnson's sketch was a bit too graffiti-artisty for my taste. Maybe Johnson was going for whimsical, but it seemed to me that she was trying for an urban (read: black, or inner-city) look. Her Michelle looks out of sorts with the crazy big hair and all those distracting handwritten notes surrounding her; they might as well be graffiti tags spray-painted on a wall. While some of the designs were indeed gorgeous, some of the drawings of Michelle's facial feautures were so suspect that they drew attention away from the dresses.

And by the way, the other black female nonmodels to grace the cover of Vogue were Marion Jones (2001), Jennifer Hudson (2007), and Oprah Winfrey (2007).* Vogue Editor Anna Wintour only let Oprah appear on the cover after she agreed to lose weight first. I can't believe Oprah, media powerhouse Oprah, even agreed to such nonsense.

You're also right, Julia, about the fashion world being inhospitable to black women. That's why my radar always goes up when I see questionable pictures or drawings of black women. If Michelle does land on the cover of Vogue, I hope they won't try, and I bet she won't allow them, to depict her in the same way they did Jennifer Hudson: slightly bent over with her mouth open wide, hair flying, and ample cleavage on view. Think loud, fat, black woman. Annie Leibovitz and Vogue were rightly criticized for the photos.

I've seen this sort of thing too many times for it to be a concidience. Just take a look at any of those obnoxious bridal magazines and notice how the women of color—the few token black and Lationo models even in the mags—are photographed. They are often wearing the more revealing dresses, their mouths are usually open or pursed in suggestive fashion, their makeup is heavier, and their hair is sometimes styled to suggest wild-haired raven. The subtle suggestion is that they are looser, or whore-light, and the imagery is stark when compared with the prim and proper, virginal-looking white models photographed with their hair done up in sophisticated buns.        

You asked if it was hard to draw a woman with black skin, and I think the answer is no, at least not for those artists/designers who don't reflexively see, and thus imagine, black women in a stereotypical light.

Correction, Dec. 12, 2008: The original sentence included only Hudson and Winfrey.

How Hard Is It To Draw Michelle Obama?

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?