Michelle Obama and Tracee Ellis Ross on the Power of Fashion

Fashion is a powerful tool, and perhaps no one understands that more than Michelle Obama. From the moment she stepped onto the public stage during her husband’s U.S. Senate campaign, through her eight years in the White House as first lady, Obama wielded her power through her fashion choices, cognizant not only of the scrutiny each ensemble would receive, but also of the story her style would tell the world about who she was and the values she held.

The former FLOTUS recounts all of this and more in a book called, The Look, out now, that charts her style evolution from childhood to today, with more than 200 photographs and behind-the-scenes stories of working with her personal stylist (and co-author) Meredith Koop, as well as makeup artist Carl Ray and hairstylists Yene Damtew and Njeri Radway, to create her most iconic fashion moments.

“During our family’s time in the White House, the way I looked was constantly being dissected—what I wore, how my hair was styled. For a while now, I’ve been wanting to reclaim more of that story, to share it in my own way,” Obama said of her decision to write the book.

The day after its release, Obama, wearing a look fresh off the Loewe runway, sat down with Tracee Ellis Ross at the Brooklyn Academy of Music for a live taping of IMO: The Look, a six-part limited companion series to her hit podcast, IMO with Michelle Obama and Craig Robinson. Read on for the biggest takeaways from their conversation.

As first lady, Obama avoided talking about fashion.

Though Obama delivered many iconic fashion moments during her time as FLOTUS, often spotlighting emerging designers of color, women, and immigrants, she let the clothes do the talking, rarely speaking about what she chose to wear or why. “I purposely avoided talking about fashion because I thought it would be a distraction from everything else that I did,” she told the audience at BAM. “I realized very early on that, as a woman in the public eye—and I write about this—that we are often reduced to what we look like. We are often attacked for what we look like.” She said she would give substantive speeches and feel disappointed after when the coverage only seemed to be about what outfit she had on “as if I had said nothing at all,” she added. “That experience kind of shook me, and I didn’t want to be solely defined by how I looked.”

She said now that it’s been nearly a decade since her time in the White House, she felt the timing was right to talk about her fashion, particularly as she was eager to recognize the work of the team that has been with her through it all.

Obama made sure she was in charge of her own story.

Not wanting to be defined by her appearance, and after receiving criticism when she started to outshine others on the campaign trail, she realized she had to take control of her story. “If I let them define me, I won’t even recognize myself,” Obama said. “I had to be smarter than them. I had to outsmart everyone. And that came to everything I did and said, including what I wore.”

She followed a motto—“let us not block the work,” meaning she never wanted to do anything that would get in the way of getting things done. “This is why I was very cautious to make sure that we matched high-end designers with low-end designers,” adding that had she shown up in head-to-toe Chanel every day, people “would have ate me alive.”

Fashion is power.

The first spouse has a key and often overlooked role of humanizing the president. “The first spouse is not elected. I did not try to become him. I tried to use the power that I had to support him and to elevate the issues that I cared about and fashion, whether the West Wing understood it or not, [matters],” Obama said. That balance she provided, along with her mother, daughters, and dogs, who all lived in the White House, resulted in extra approval points for her husband, she said. “The East Wing [where the FLOTUS and her staff work], is the heart of the work and to denigrate it, to tear it down, to pretend like it doesn't matter...” she said, shaking her head pointedly.

There was so much behind-the-scenes work done on every look.

Obama said her styling team “took the burden of thinking about fashion off of my plate in a way that allowed me to show up without worrying about what am I wearing? Is it appropriate?”

Trips abroad required an extra amount of work. Her stylist Koop, who was just 28 years old when she began working with Obama, closely coordinated with the State Department and the West Wing to plan each look. Koop had to consider the diplomatic goals for the trip, how current events may inform the tone of the fashion, the local customs, what the weather would be—was Obama going to sweat out in silk or get rained on, if they would be walking on cobblestones or grass, and so on. “She had to know the schedule, she had to know movements, and she had to carry everything with her. She didn't have an assistant. And it was her doing all of this for eight years without complaint, without fanfare, without wanting credit,” Obama said of Koop. “My team understood the assignment. Yes, it was about fashion, but it was also about America. It was about representation; it was about the work; it was about supporting the first Black first family.”

Diane von Furstenberg redesigned her famous wrap dress for Obama.

Every woman looks great in a wrap dress—until they sit down. Because Obama couldn’t risk flashing the crowd when she sat, Koop asked Diane von Furstenberg to add a panel to her iconic design to ensure there would be no gaps when the first lady sat. Obama marveled at the guts it took for Koop to ask such a thing of a designer: “To be that young and have the confidence to go to a designer and go, ‘This is not going to work. You are going to have to cut that [in] half. That sleeve is coming off.’ ... I know she made some of you mad because she was like, I know what is going to work for Michelle,” Obama added to the designers in the room.

Her hairstyle was just as intentional as her clothes.

In the same way that she did not want her fashion to be a distraction, Obama said she also did not want the focus to be on her hair. To that end, she said she chose to conform to white beauty standards, wearing her hair straight throughout her eight years in the White House. “I didn’t feel like I had the leeway to wear braids as first lady. Look, anything different that we did—a fist bump, my arms out—y’all come on, you could pretend like I could wear braids, but this is where you just have to have sense. ... I was trying to get people healthy and protect military families, I just didn’t have the time to explain braids to the world, so I just didn’t do it. That was one fight I wasn’t going to take on.”

But she had to get her hair touched up two or three times a day to maintain the sleek look and it took a toll. “My hairstylist said, ‘You’re not going to have your hair if we keep doing this,’” Obama said. “And that’s when he finally convinced me to start using extensions and wigs and things like that.” Those measures “saved my hair,” she said, allowing her to leave the White House “with her edges intact.”

She added that she always planned to go back to wearing braids after leaving the White House. “I knew that I wanted to make that statement at some point,” she said. “And wearing my hair and braids when we unveiled our official White House portrait to me was the chance.”

She surprised her husband with her state dinner gowns.

Out of an abundance of caution, Obama said she always had three dresses ready for important events like state dinners and didn’t decide which she would wear until the night of. She kept the winning gown a surprise from her husband, unveiling her choice to him just before the event in the way that some brides do at their weddings. “That became our ritual,” she said. “It was our only really, really cool date night we could have.” She added that sometimes the president would give his unsolicited opinion on her looks, and she would have to tell him, “It’s fashion, you don’t understand.”