White House glamour dipped with the Ford and the Nixon eras, and hit what is considered a historic low during the administration of Jimmy Carter, who came to the White House at the height of the recession of the ’70s. The Carters wanted to eliminate waste (early on, he sold off the presidential yacht, the Sequoia, as a cost-cutting move). Carter wore a US$175 business suit to his swearing-in ceremony. His wife, Rosalind, wore the same plain, off-the-rack dress she’d worn to her husband’s gubernatorial inauguration, and people were appalled. Instead of riding in a limousine, they walked along the parade route and shook hands with people. “He didn’t have inaugural balls,” says Rubenstein. “If you look at his invitations, he invites people to inaugural ‘parties.’ There were questions that he took it too far in the other direction.” His approach may have fit the times, but it depressed people to look at.
With the arrival of Ronald and Nancy Reagan in 1981, a new high-water mark for White House glam was set. A good-looking couple with Hollywood connections and a taste for the finer things, they spent a whopping US$16.3 million on inaugural festivities. Frank Sinatra performed, and Nancy Reagan wore a US$10,000 hand-beaded gown by Galanos, an American couturier. As was to be expected, there were critics, notably Barry Goldwater, who said, “When you’ve got to pay $2,000 for a limousine, $7 to park and $2.50 to check your coat at a time when most Americans can’t hack it, that’s ostentatious.”
In 1993, when Bill Clinton came into office—after George and Barbara Bush, a gutsy, traditional family from the Second World War era—he brought in a whole new sort of glamour. For one thing, he broke the record for the number of official balls held: 14 of them, at a cost of US$33 million, and he partied at them all. “Clinton had this way of presenting himself as America’s first rock ’n’ roll president,” says John Orman, chair of the department of politics at Fairfield University in Connecticut, and author of several books on the American presidency. “When Clinton was sworn in, it was sort of like a People magazine reunion. He let the celebrities use the Lincoln Bedroom in the White House. Tom Hanks would go there.” He would do things like appear on The Phil Donahue Show, play saxophone on The Arsenio Hall Show, and visit MTV. “They asked him, do you wear boxers or briefs?” says Orman. “Normally presidents don’t get asked questions like that. He was participating in new media.”
There was a national fascination with Bill and Hillary Clinton—specifically, their oddity as a couple. “He comes across as the sexier-looking figure and seems to be more at ease with himself in terms of appearance and dress,” says Mears. “I think Mrs. Clinton has struggled a bit with that.” In the early days of his presidency, Hillary dressed plainly, with minimal makeup. For her clothes, she relied on an Arkansas-based designer, and was roundly lambasted. By the time Clinton was sworn in for a second term in 1997, she had learned the importance of appearance—and raised the ante with new hair, new makeup and an Oscar de la Renta gown (not that this has quieted her critics).
Laura Bush underwent a parallel style evolution during her White House stay. When her husband was sworn in in 2001, she opted for a Dallas designer named Michael Faircloth, best known for dressing Texan matrons and the Dallas Cowboys cheerleaders. By 2005, Bush’s second swearing-in, she too had switched to Oscar de la Renta. In fact, she wore a different gown to each of nine inaugural balls that year. The total cost of the festivities was US$42.3 million, the most expensive inaugural celebration in history to that point.
The glamour of the Obama family is not that of the dynastic Kennedys, even though both are young, effortlessly stylish and athletic (see his buff vacation photos). Nor is it that of the Reagans, with their Hollywood pedigree, even though there is no denying the Obamas’ star power. The Obamas are adored by celebrities—from Oprah to Will.I.Am to Scarlett Johansson—but unlike Bill Clinton, who seemed to love nothing more than a celebrity photo op, they keep stars at arm’s length so as not to appear frivolous or pandering.
They always look impeccable, and yet it doesn’t feel like they’re products of teams of stylists. “Mrs. Obama is fascinating because it’s very unusual to see an American go this far in terms of experimenting with young designers,” says Mears. “Some of the risks she’s taken I think have not been as well received, but the fact that she’s wearing Narciso Rodriguez, Jason Wu, Isabel Toledo—people even mainstream fashion press don’t really wear—I think that’s innate.”
Perhaps most remarkable, observers say, is how Barack Obama glamorized the office of the president-elect, “an office that technically does not exist,” says Orman. “After he won the election, he held a press conference in Chicago, put a seal up and the seal said, the ‘President-Elect of the United States.’ Then all of the reporters started calling him ‘Mr. President-Elect’ and he held press conferences. I mean we’ve had people with small transition teams before. But we’ve never had someone walking around saying, I represent the office of the president-elect. So he got people to buy into that and he really elevated it.” In a sense, he has already accomplished what perhaps no president in history has managed to do: instill the presidential office with glamour and sex appeal, despite—and even because of—his sheen of modesty.
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