The XX Factor: What women really think.

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.