Michelle Obama's European adventure — in pictures

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, March 31, 2009 at 6:15 PM - 45 Comments

Newsmakers: The White Album

By Anne Kingston - Thursday, March 26, 2009 at 9:10 AM - 0 Comments

The blizzard began with Michelle Obama’s creamy Jason Wu confection that completed a top-of-the-wedding-cake tableau with the tuxedoed new President, and continued, days later, with Anne Hathaway’s Grecian glam at the Screen Actors Guild Awards. At Washington balls and on Hollywood red carpets, white is hotter than red, fresher than black. And for good reason: the luxuriously impractical hue assures the showstopping entrance enjoyed by brides on their big day. Plus, no shade better shows off every hour logged with the trainer—especially when it’s shiny as the beheaded Valentino that Jennifer Aniston wore to the Oscars, which, at five kilos, itself provided a workout. White demands and rewards impeccable craftmanship, as illustrated by Marisa Tomei’s amazing homage to New York’s Chrystler Building, and it’s the brand new antidote to doom and gloom. Like Penélope Cruz brandishing her Oscar, it shouts: “This is my big day”—even when everyone else is wearing it.

Click here for the gallery of dresses.

Newsmakers: The White Album gallery

By macleans.ca - Thursday, March 26, 2009 at 9:05 AM - 0 Comments

Newsmakers: Arrivals

By Lianne George - Thursday, March 26, 2009 at 9:00 AM - 0 Comments

Why America is up in arms about Mrs. O's sleevelessness

By Anne Kingston - Thursday, March 5, 2009 at 8:12 PM - 23 Comments

Let’s just cut to the chase about what’s really fuelling Sleevegate: the primary reason America is up in arms, so to speak, about Michelle Obama’s penchant for sleeveless clothing has less to do with decorum than the fact it’s her one look most of the nation can’t imitate—or at least imitate and look good doing it. Sure, women can buy knock-offs of her oversized pearls or order some of her more affordable outfits from J.Crew. But, as any woman over 35 knows, the First Lady’s arms didn’t sculpt themselves. It takes daily discipline and countless reps to achieve that kind of definition. And there’s nowhere you can go to order it. No cosmetic surgeon has yet figured out a procedure that offers the same effect (and whoever does will be set for life). So who can blame the First Lady for wanting to show her toned triceps off?

But clearly the act of showing them off is problematic—at least symbolically. First, it suggests vanity, a trait First Ladies shouldn’t have. Secondly, it conveys strength. As has been endlessly pointed out, Jackie Kennedy also wore sleeveless dresses as her signature. But there’s a big difference: Mrs. Kennedy’s arms appeared as unthreatening as her breathy little-girl voice. Michelle Obama looks like she could arm wrestle with her husband and win. Evidently that’s discomfiting for a lot of people who expect the First Lady, the role model for a nation, to be domesticated and docile. Consider the fluffy “Life in the Obama White House” story in the current issue of People, on whose cover Mrs. O appears flashing bared arms. Repeatedly, the First Lady is referred to as husband’s “helpmate,” an archaic term that’s been replaced by the more equalitarian “partner.”

Predictably, the flap has spun out into a discussion of female rights internationally, with Islam becoming the basis of comparison. On Huffintonpost.com, Bonnie Fuller asked: “Is Michelle Obama supposed to wear a burka?” Writing in the Guardian, Natalie Hanman spins the fracas into a discussion of the ongoing attempt to control the presentation of women’s bodies: “With International Women’s Day this Sunday, it’s a timely reminder of the limitations and risks in an imperialist (or, indeed, imperialist feminist) view of gender equality, which not only ignores the contextual and complex reasons why some women wear the hijab and why other women resist it even when it is a legal requirement – it also fails to interrogate the west’s own role in inhibiting women’s rights, not least when it comes to the control over women’s bodies and what they wear.” .

Really, it’s a lot more simple: in going sleeveless, Michelle Obama, who from day one has used clothing as a political weapon, is telegraphing a message to a public that seems to analyze her every costume change with more rigor than it does her husband’s policies. And that message says: “I’m dressing as I please, folks.” And if her toned triceps serve as inspiration for women—and even men—to hit the gym so than can imitate her look—and look good doing it—all the better.

Post-racial America?

By Luiza Ch. Savage - Thursday, January 22, 2009 at 4:00 PM - 50 Comments

It could have been mistaken for a religious pilgrimage. The spirit of the crowds that gathered was not loudly partisan. There was giddiness to be sure, but the overriding feeling was solemn. The sense of History Being Made was on every corner, from the Sunday-best hats and cashmere coats in the crowd to the inescapable commemorative Obamabilia being hawked everywhere. A desire among the crowds who braved the cold to be merely present, to bear witness, to breathe the same air, to be part of this national ceremony that promised a renewal, a national resurrection of sorts. In an America beaten down by recession and wars, they had come to see with their own eyes the making of the First Black President.

As many as two million people were present for President Barack Obama’s inauguration. Two days before, some 400,000 had come together for a concert at the Doric temple columns of the Lincoln Memorial. It was here that Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. proclaimed in 1963 that he had a dream, and now the son of a white mother from Kansas and a father from Kenya was in the process of fulfilling it. Obama’s face was everywhere—on the massive banners draping the neoclassical columns of the white monumental buildings in the city, on buttons, T-shirts, a sea of magazine covers, his smile emblazoned on everything from tote bags to earrings.
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Oh, Mrs. O

By Anne Kingston - Thursday, December 11, 2008 at 9:00 AM - 5 Comments

Michelle Obama is a woman of stunningly impressive accomplishments—degrees from Princeton and Harvard, a successful law career, two beautiful daughters. Plus there’s a husband about to become the world’s most powerful man who calls her “my rock.” Yet her most significant influence is as a fashion icon—in other words, a mannequin. In the space of one year, Mrs. Obama has catapulted onto every best-dressed list: in July, Vanity Fair dubbed her “commander in sheath,” a reference to her fondness for form-fitting dresses that show off her toned triceps. Fashion blogs, most prominently the obsessive mrs-o.org, monitor her every sartorial decision. Mere hours after the Obamas sat down with Barbara Walters in November, the world knew the future first lady had been wearing a US$3,510 ivory raw silk sheath with hand-embroidered ebony rosettes from the spring 2009 collection of the young American designer Jason Wu. Who she’ll wear to the inauguration is a topic of fevered discussion. Salon.com stoked the public ardour last month with “First lady got back,” an over-the-top piece celebrating Mrs. Obama’s booty. “There’s a definite hysteria,” says Mandi Norwood, who hopes to capitalize on the mania with her forthcoming book, Michelle Obama Style Guide, a primer on the wide belts, bold brooches, vivid colours, florals, flats and fake gumball pearls that are the future first lady’s fashion signatures.

Michelle Obama, no fool she, has figured out the powerful role clothing plays in telegraphing a political message. The fact she shows interest in fashion at all, beyond the safe society designers favoured by Washington matrons, reinforces Barack Obama’s cred as a Beltway outsider attuned to the public mood. True to the Obama message, Mrs. O’s style is more aspirational than material, and she’s Exhibit A: a black woman from Chicago’s South Side who’s not a size 2 fashion model dictating American style.

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For the last time, people, she's nothing like Hillary—or Michelle Obama

By Sarmishta Subramanian - Friday, September 5, 2008 at 9:25 AM - 18 Comments

Why do people keep assuming that just because Sarah Palin can theoretically wear a pantsuit, she’s part of Hillary’s sisterhood? Or—even more desperate reach here—of Michelle Obama’s?

Much more accurate to compare her with Dubya, as Salon has done, with this excellent quiz, a list of cowboy quotes from Palin and George W. Bush. Which ones are Palin and which ones Bush? It’s pretty damn hard to tell.

Celebrating the Clinton legacy

By John Parisella - Wednesday, August 27, 2008 at 5:40 PM - 0 Comments

As speechmaking goes, the Democratic convention in Denver is about to scale new heights. Teddy Kennedy and Michelle Obama on Monday delivered what all observers qualify as poignant and inspirational addresses. Last night, Hillary Clinton clearly delivered a speech of presidential caliber. Not to be outdone, we can expect former President Bill Clinton to be at the top of his game. Clinton arguably the best speaker in American politics largely due to his conversational style and pedagogical skills will be delivering a speech that will make the case for Obama against McCain and present the arguments contrasting the economic policies of the Democrats and the Republicans. Senator Joe Biden, the presumptive vice-presidential nominee will complete the evening and in all likelihood will convince the delegates that he is indeed a solid choice.

Two nights and two Clintons, it will be a hard act to follow. We can expect former President Clinton to outline how more productive his economic policies were in his eight years in office than George W. Bush’s policies were since 2001. President Clinton will also make the case for America’s standing in the world, one where her allies looked up to the President for leadership and direction. Expect Clinton to show the benefits of multilateral diplomacy over the Bush doctrine. Finally, it will be an occasion for the former President to draw the parallel between his candidacy in 1992 and that of Barack Obama. Back then, Bill Clinton was the change candidate. Just like John F. Kennedy, his resume was certainly modest when compared to other potential contenders. Yet, Clinton then was able to appeal to idealism and present a new vision. His experience in economic matters and foreign affairs was nearly as limited as that of Obama, but once in office he had the intelligence and the capacity to grow and represent the most successful Democratic presidency since FDR. This would be an effective way to demonstrate that Obama is ready to lead to counter the Republican spin of the last month. It may not be enough but it will go a long way.

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Megapundit: Flummery! Flimshaw! Flim-flam! Bumf!

By selley - Wednesday, August 27, 2008 at 1:14 PM - 0 Comments

Must-reads: Don Martin and Lawrence Martin on Election Fever!; L. Ian MacDonald on Obama’s speech.

The power of speech
The pundits offer advice for Barack Obama and sympathy, at best, for Hillary Clinton.

All Obama has to do tomorrow night, L. Ian MacDonald opines in the Montreal Gazette, is “deliver on what the first George Bush called ‘the vision thing’, … tell his story to those Americans who haven’t heard it, … [and] confront the nagging doubts of whether America is ready for a black president,” and do it all in a speech that’s better than any he’s made thus far. No small task. Thus, MacDonald suggests Obama consult John F. Kennedy’s 1960 nomination acceptance speech, in which he “squarely addressed … whether America was prepared to elect a Catholic president,” and Bill Clinton’s in 1992 for inspiration on how to tell his personal story.

The Toronto Star‘s Thomas Walkom heard very little about Obama in Clinton’s speech last night and a whole lot of “cold logic”—i.e., that Americans who want “things like … universal health care” should want a Democrat in the White House, flawed and male though he may be. In other words: “Forget your reservations about Obama; he’s better than the alternative.” But Clinton’s attempt to sell suspicious female voters on Michelle Obama as the woman’s voice in the White House must have been galling, Walkom suggests, given that in emphasizing “her loyal brother, her stay-at-home mom and her two daughters,” Mrs. Obama had “chose[n] to pander to America’s ingrained prejudice against strong-minded women.”

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Yes, she can

By Anne Kingston - Tuesday, August 26, 2008 at 1:38 PM - 0 Comments

Wow. Michelle Obama passed her audition for the Western world’s most retrograde job magna cum laude last night. With perfect pitch, she hit the only note that mattered: that she’s an eloquent, emotive domestic team player—a wife, mother, daughter and sister familiar with sacrifice, working-class integrity and the kind of family values America demands of its First Lady. Even in 2008, the U.S. First Family exists in a fantasy nuclear time warp—he’s the ultimate alpha male, she the beta female helpmeet who doesn’t hold a job outside the home, bears his name, focuses on children (either existing or through worthy causes) and White House decoration.

OK, maybe there were moments that the impassioned-to-the-point-of tears speech seemed over-the-top. But the girl did what needed to be done. Gone was any tinge of the wry sarcasm evident in her first public outings—no affectionate jibes about her hubby’s funky morning breath, no fist-bumping which had her compared to a Black Panther with a ‘fro in The New Yorker, a magazine which once understood the meaning of “satire.” Her campaign remark that she was “proud of her country for the first time” that caused such a flap was replaced by a heartfelt “I love this country.” She dressed the part: her aqua dress was stylish but not distracting; she skipped her trademark outsized pearls (too obvious). And, smartly, she played down her Harvard Law School degree, instead focusing on family and country—heaping appreciation on her brother, her stay-at-home mother (watching proudly from the audience), her blue-collar father afflicted with multiple sclerosis (“our rock, our provider, our hero”). She was brilliant, Jackie Kennedy with street cred.

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Megapundit: Rocky Mountain high, and the Ottawa crash

By selley - Tuesday, August 26, 2008 at 1:17 PM - 0 Comments

Must-reads: James Travers on the incredibly unedifying election we are about to endure; Rosie DiManno, Margaret Wente and Andrew Cohen on the much more interesting election Americans are about to enjoy.

So lonely and sadly alone
The Canadian media have descended upon Denver en masse, but don’t worry—we’re holding down the fort.

The Globe and Mail‘s Margaret Wente thinks Michelle Obama is “tough, direct and disciplined,” and “a terrific asset” to her husband’s campaign. And even though she’s toned down her well-known stridency for the convention—”edited her image to suit the occasion,” in Wente’s words—her personality says a very good thing about Obama himself: namely, “that he desired an equal partnership with a strong, outspoken woman.” The voters must decide which of Barack and Michelle or John and Cindy are “the real elitists,” Wente concludes, but she finds it mighty tough to pick Michelle Obama over the “living cliché of an Arizona Republican’s wife.”

The Toronto Star‘s Rosie DiManno saw Michelle Obama’s speech last night as “connecting the tapestry of her parents’ working class virtues to the principles espoused by her husband,” and as a sort of Cole’s Notes version of the campaign’s main thrust “for those who maybe didn’t quite get it yet.” She’s a “steadfast daughter of Chicago’s South Side,” says DiManno, and unlike her husband has spent her entire life in the U.S. As such, DiManno suggests she might represent Obama’s “passport to that Middle America of big shoulders and hard work rewarded.” (Also, have you ever wanted to know why Mrs. Obama doesn’t wear pantyhose? Come on, sure you have. “Long legs,” DiManno explains. “Can’t get them to fit properly.”)

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Michelle Obama in 2012?

By Lianne George - Monday, August 25, 2008 at 11:57 PM - 0 Comments

Did we just witness the advent of the next great U.S. politician?

For those who missed it, Michelle Obama’s address at the Democratic Convention in Denver last night was pretty spectacular. 

For weeks, observers have been complaining about her inability to convey sufficient warmth or, as one CBC commentator called it this evening, to generate the requisite “warm-and-fuzzies.” (Isn’t that what White House pets and Christmas decorations are for?)  But last night, she nailed all of the key First Lady criteria: affability, sincerity, accessibility, shiny hair. Her critics will have their work cut out for them in identifying traces of anti-Americanism and elitism in this speech—the core of which outlined the key elements of her “improbable” (her words) personal journey, as well as her husband’s. Barack Obama has one hell of a teammate. Now they just have to sustain the optimism. It’s a long way down.

The full text of Michelle Obama’s DNC speech is available here on The Huffington Post

And, also, I don't hate America

By Luiza Ch. Savage - Monday, August 25, 2008 at 6:57 PM - 0 Comments

Excerpts from Michelle Obama’s speech are below:

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Actual CNN Democratic convention headline

By Paul Wells - Monday, August 25, 2008 at 6:06 PM - 0 Comments

“Wife to Praise Husband”

You almost don’t have to watch Michelle Obama’s speech tonight any more, do you.

Megapundit: Take that, Telecom Trotskyites!

By selley - Friday, June 13, 2008 at 1:22 PM - 0 Comments

Must-reads: Colby Cosh on science vs. big pharma; Susan Riley on the residential schools apology; Dan Gardner on an oil price floor; Daphne Bramham on human trafficking in Canada.

Let’s make this complicated
While the government apologized for what the aboriginal residential schools were, some pundits seem determined to focus on what they weren’t.

“Had government agents come to round up your kids and mine, I doubt we would have kept quiet about it for 80 years or more,” Lorne Gunter writes in the Edmonton Journal in praise of yesterday’s apology. But it’s important to recognize, he argues, that the system was “well-intentioned” and not harmful or destructive in every single case. Which is a fair point—a sense of proportion is important. But comparing modern “native skills training” programs to the “early form of such training” offered at residential schools, and asking how the program could have been “evil” then but “magnanimous” now is ridiculous. Surely no educational system that’s predicated on abducting its students from their parents has any claim to magnanimousness, no matter what good it accomplishes.

John Robson, writing in the Ottawa Citizen, welcomes the apology but rejects the notion that the residential schools were “responsible for the catastrophic collision between traditional aboriginal culture and European modernity.” This is a notion we’d not come across until Robson introduced it, but we’re happy to join him in declaring it bunk. He also “utterly reject[s] any suggestion that Canadian aboriginals were dwelling in Eden until the Europeans came and expelled them”—again, never heard that one before, but it sounds perfectly reasonable to us.

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Political Eye Candy

By Luiza Ch. Savage - Monday, May 19, 2008 at 1:56 PM - 0 Comments

The WaPo had two interesting pieces over the weekend analyzing the production of some of the… let’s call them “visual effects” of the presidential campaigns.

First, there was this piece about Vogue magazine photo shoots of two aspiring First Ladies. (It’s written by Robin Givhan who won a Pulitzer for her fashion writing and brought us this highly controversial analysis Hillary Clinton’s cleavage — a story I would have liked better if I thought that Clinton had actually shown cleavage, but I digress.) The Vogue photos apparently demonstrate that John McCain’s wife, Cindy, simply can’t relax. That’s kind of kind of endearing, at least to those of us who, uhh, can’t relax. Writes Givhan: “McCain appears to be working to shatter a public image of the pretty — but starched — accessory.” Frankly, she has had a pretty smooth ride so far. Remember those stories in the 2000 primary about how she took prescription pain killers from her medical own charity to feed an addiction? Imagine if that had been Michelle Obama. The same people who send out emails arguing that Obama is a Muslim would have her down as some kind of crack addict by now.

Meanwhile, Michelle Obama has also had her own Vogue shoot last September, whose purpose is apparently the opposite of McCain’s. Write Givhan, “Obama’s photos seemed crafted specifically to help the viewer imagine her in the role of first lady. She is a study in little black dresses, conservative pearls, preppy hair and restraint. Again, the implied message is unmistakable: I am neither subversive nor threatening. I am not some scary “other.” I am Camelot with a tan.” (Here’s one.)

Hillary Clinton posed for the cover of Vogue in 1998. I’m not sure what the message was supposed to be there other than wow, don’t I look great in Oscar de la Renta gown. Actually, yeah, that was the point, according to Anna Wintour.

This time Clinton reportedly backed out of a planned shoot with Vogue. Maybe she thought it’s too First Lady-like and not presidential enough. Or maybe it was too glam and elitist. Too calculating? But then her campaign agreed to a spread in US Weekly, complete with a section entitled “My Worst Outfits Ever!” How very non-elitist, Every Gal, and approachable.

Of course, that metrosexual elitist Barack Obama had no problem doing a cover for Men’s Vogue.

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Elsewhere on the visual theme, here is an interesting piece on the origins of that ubiquitous, iconic, and somewhat Soviet-esque Obama poster , and Shepard Fairey, the Heidegger-quoting graffiti artist who designed it.