Secolo d’Italia – A postmodern First Lady goes to the White House

Michelle Obama at once reassuring mother and self-made woman with a personal style

Barrack Obama is a revolution. Michelle Robinson Obama is a revolution twice over. He is the first African-American to be elected President of the United States of America. She is the first African-American wife in the White House and the first untraditional First Lady.
Not that this is going to be a political commentary on the presidential election in the U.S. or on the new President; it is purely a style section piece focussed strictly on Michelle. Indeed, the electoral season across the Atlantic featured a number of female models and many different ways of relating to power. At center stage during the primaries was the forceful and confrontational Hillary Clinton, but what captured media attention was the abrupt burst on the scene of the bolt from the blue Sarah Palin while Cindy (fixed gaze and prime time tailoring), the inscrutable wife of John McCain and daughter of one of America’s wealthiest and most famous families, cut a figure in the background. Of course, Michelle was there too. And now that Michelle is about to come into the White House, there are no end of comparisons between her and her predecessors in the role of First Lady. But it’s already very clear that Mrs Obama is and will remain very unlike everyone else: from the retiring model-wife Nancy Reagan, to the recipe-sharing and steadfastly charitable Laura Bush; from the previously mentioned and overly mannish Hillary Clinton to grandmother and apple pie Barbara Bush, to the emblematically elegant Jacqueline Kennedy. It’s not just a matter of skin color.  Forty-five year old Michelle comes from humble beginnings, and she is a “self-made woman” who studied at Harvard and Princeton, has a PhD, worked at the Sidley & Austin law firm in Chicago (where she met Barack), and before taking extended leave for the electoral campaign, headed Chicago’s University Hospital.

She’ll have to carve out a role for herself, but she already has a unique style, not defined by the middle-class grace of her dress, defined cheap and chic (the object of too many comments by too many!) nor her passion for Italian cuisine and restaurants (also way too much said about her favorite stringozzi alla carbonara) but by the fact that she is a cultured, tough, sarcastic, and independent woman, who is also an equal partner in her marriage. Michelle is self-confident; as they say “she knows what’s what.” Hers is a deeply symbolic value, the same symbolic value that has been one of the many powerful forces driving the electoral, political and generational revolution that was unleashed. During the campaign, in her electoral campaign, Michelle was a whirlwind: some emotional rallies in support and in lieu of her husband; two appearances on very popular TV shows; visits to military families; involvement (from forever) in charitable and non-profit efforts. She’s a hurricane force even in daily routines, be it her shared female concern about saving on groceries, gripes—now public knowledge on the entire planet—about her husband leaving his socks lying around or the pat of butter that wasn’t put back in the fridge, and above all the Michelle “super-mom” of two young daughters (who are even now promised a normal childhood), a woman who takes sides with working women and fights for equal pay for men and women alike. She has become a female icon, a champion among the women jugglers who daily strive to balance no shortage of different roles and commitments; the complexities of life today have rendered obsolete the old saying about “a dual presence” at home and at the office. Women’s lives have changed just as much!

Tall, fit, frank, Michelle doesn’t ever seem to have something to prove; always candid and sincere, matter-of-fact, intelligent and sensitive, she seems almost “more genuine” than her husband. She understood quickly that she would have to reassure voters if she wanted to contribute to her husband’s victory, and reassuring she became and even the couple of gaffes that early on had caused concern among advisors and democratic staff were soon forgotten. At the end of the presidential electoral campaign, she emerged too victorious, on her own merits. Not only was she a marketing image for her husband, she was a proponent and key player in the longed-for political and social renewal that Obama’s election represents. Above all, Michelle shuts down analysts, commentators, journalists, observers and curiosity-seekers of all sorts because she doesn’t fit into any female stereotype. Now more than ever, precisely because she is so unlike the usual stereotypes and mindsets that dog and latch onto First Ladies, she baffles everyone and forces them to think, leave prejudice behind and make judgments that reflect how things and people actually are.

Michelle is tradition and post-modernism, which could be an oxymoron or just the right mix.  As she’s said in many an interview: “This is how I am, I am what I am.. .”—no easy task in a position like hers.

The end has come for those who make a profession out of stereotyping and boxcutting people into categories and for the cliché artists who oversimplify and trivialize things become far more complex; no matter what happens to the presidential couple, malicious tongues will have to throw in the towel: Barack and Michelle, the Obama’s, are a political couple and they are in synch. There is also the pre-political Obama’s, an apparently affectionate couple who truly like one other, truly care for each other, and above all, give the impression of two earnest people. Their family life also seems normal and they appear to be two responsible parents who instill confidence. This normalcy turned out to be a political powerhouse: image and substance.

“America’s most famous wife and mother” has the underpinnings of a charismatic “female at the helm”. Her personal background is evidence of rising up through social ranks and her style has driven fear out from America and brought a “sense of blackness” (the blackness she herself spoke of) into politics. Clearly, she made an effort to temper and ‘mellow’ her personality; she succeeded. Now, even though we don’t know what she’ll do at the White House, what we do know is that she got there and did so by being a both popular and wholesome ‘queen of the people’. At any rate, not ‘behind a great man’, like the old and insufferable saying goes, but alongside him.

After a forceful Hillary, reassuring Laura Bush and media bombshell Sarah Palin, the runway belongs to the First Lady’s fashionable cheap and chic.

Isabella Rauti