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?)

Michelle Obama To Wear Isabel Toledo

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!

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.

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?