Michelle Obama Shows How You Can Be Pretty AND Powerful at Work
First Lady Michelle Obama is showing women they can wear serious fashion and still be taken seriously.
By Kate Betts
It's hard not to think that Michelle Obama would have found a lot to like on the runways for Spring 2011. But even more than the individual looks on the runway, the first lady would appreciate this season's message: There's power in personal style.
Nobody expresses that sentiment more profoundly than Obama, who, with her curvy, feminine dresses, kitten heels, and kitschy brooches, has proved that power can be pretty. She has almost single-handedly revolutionized the concept of power dressing, rejecting the idea that clothes in a business setting must conceal femininity, minimize individuality, or function as corporate armor.
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For some women in powerful positions, this is a validation of beliefs they've always held but were too timid or careful to act on. To better understand the influence of our first lady's style, I interviewed a number of top female executives in different professions--women like Mellody Hobson, president of Ariel Investments, who is a Chicagoan like Obama and also has great style, which she describes modestly as professional and simple. But what struck me was Hobson's willingness to go against the grain in a corporate setting. The day I met her, she was wearing a silver Azzedine Alaïa cardigan with a matching miniskirt and Christian Louboutin platform pumps--not your typical corner-office outfit.
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"Style helps distinguish you," she told me while I was researching my new book, Everyday Icon: Michelle Obama and the Power of Style. "It's a great potential opportunity that people tend to leave by the wayside." Indeed, for many professional women, there's something almost thrilling and even risqué in the idea that style might be useful, an expression of aesthetic intelligence and sophistication that could actually enhance their effectiveness. Obama is the exemplar of this new attitude. With her bright citrus-tone pantsuits, floral-print dresses, and glamorous evening gowns, she is suggesting by example that style is an asset, not a liability. Her influence is especially strong on women just starting out in the corporate world.
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"Her look has become a uniform for a younger generation of working women on Wall Street," says Alexandra Lebenthal, the president and CEO of Lebenthal & Co. "When I go to meetings at Morgan Stanley to talk to their syndicate desk, there's always a vice president between the ages of 28 and 32 wearing a ruffled blouse, a pencil skirt, and a cardigan." Thanks to the first lady, many of these young women might show up at the office this spring in Céline's boldly striped blouses or Akris's kelly-green leather jacket--both looks decidedly more casual than the sharp-shouldered power suits that have ruled boardrooms for three decades. Even when suits are required (and the first lady has worn them occasionally), Stella McCartney's blush-pink pantsuit makes prettiness part of the deal.
In many ways, Obama's style is the natural culmination of a century of sartorial struggles for working women. If fashion is an immediate and unflinching barometer of politics and society, then her look is a reflection of the achievements of a postfeminist generation--a generation of women who believe that a love of clothes doesn't undermine their intellectual gravitas.
Excerpted from the March issue of Harper's Bazaar. Click here to read the full story>>
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