Michelle Obama’s new book about style lacks substance

First lady is a strange role. Even when your husband is the first black president, and you’re a Princeton and Harvard-educated former corporate lawyer, America still projects its most regressive ideas about gender onto you. So I understand that Michelle Obama, like Hillary Clinton before her (skipping Laura Bush, a more classical first lady, along with, more recently, Jill Biden and Melania Trump), might have felt constrained, faced with expectations she could never satisfy.

I don’t doubt that being black added enormously to that burden. Yet there is nothing more irritating than the person of Michelle Obama complaining. And she is always complaining. There is always sexism or racism or some other “ism” – even though her life course belies much of her insistence on rampant, endemic race- and gender-based injustice in contemporary America. She was first lady of the US, for crying out loud. She is a global figure of adoration. She wears the finest gowns. She’s a “thought leader,” a power broker and activist – albeit of the yummy-mummy variety – in a way Meghan Markle will only ever be able to dream of.

Obama’s career as first lady was devoted to campaigning on children’s diet, education and veterans’ families – all noble commitments, though certainly pretty gendered. The Look also homes in on another typically feminine interest: her fashion. The book is a “celebration of style” and a tell-all about how she used “the beauty and intrigue of fashion to draw attention to her message,” walking the reader through her sartorial choices from prim cardigans to ball gowns to her edgier choice of designers since she left the White House. One of the key players in this deployment of “the look” is Meredith Koop, her ride-or-die stylist, along with her makeup and hair people and a number of designers. It’s a little strange that this is all parceled up as a political message of “inclusion,” but there you are. The semiotics of appearance know no bounds.

Still, fashion is not actually a substitute for words, actions and thoughts. You can power-dress but be powerless, or you can dress down and wield tremendous say over things. Even as a woman, especially as a black woman – and very much as a first lady.

You’d think, however, based on this book, that fashion is an actual, literal battleground, and that all the prejudices its author continues to complain of find their most pointed outlet in the question of what she ought to wear. And, especially, of how she should do her hair. Having been cruelly ridiculed for my own bushy crop as a Jewish child in an insular WASPy town in 1980s New England, I know that a world of nastiness and mockery can be whipped up about how a girl or woman wears her hair. Even today, I’m often trolled online for my sometimes messy coiffure in TV appearances.

When it comes to black women’s hair, there is obviously a distinctive semiotics of judgment that can be truly vicious and vile. But again, the implication of The Look is that Obama, even as globally lauded first lady in the 2010s, had the same level of vulnerability to overweening prejudice as an elementary school student in the 1980s.

Obsessing over mean comments by bits of the media can point to enduring racist tropes in those quarters, of course. But it can also point to a tendency to ruminate and whine pettily over something on whose significance the jury may well be out, especially in a post-BLM America where women of color are deified in many a workplace, cornrows are seen as a key cultural inheritance and cultural appropriation remains a sin.

But here is Michelle: “What I understood was that at some point I wanted to show up publicly with my hair fully as it comes out of my head,” she said. For her, noted the New York Times in one of many adoring articles, a natural approach to hair “meant braids. It was just a question of when.” And what a question!

Obama goes on to muse on the recent evolution in products for black women’s hair, which is undoubtedly an interesting topic with cultural resonances, but does somewhat smack of sanctimony and rather strikingly traditional female interests for a Democratic ballbuster. “There’s so many lines and products, there’s so much knowledge – heat, the tools that are being used. It’s now a multibillion-dollar industry. That’s just happened in my lifetime,” writes Obama, with dazzling dullness. “I didn’t link to the fact that this is what Black actresses in Hollywood are doing.”

Is this really what feminists from Betty Friedan to bell hooks fought for? Perhaps to ask the question is itself unjust. After all, Obama has been through a lot, such as public “fascination” with her oft-sported bare, muscular arms which, she says, was used to “otherize” her.

But otherizing or not, there’s no excuse for being an advocate for female victims of sexual violence, and yet bailing on those who suffered one of the most heinous sprees of weaponized rape against women in the 21st century. Since October 7, 2023, Obama – a vocal campaigner for the girls kidnapped in Nigeria by Boko Haram in 2014 – has had nothing to say about the Israeli girls and women tortured, sexually abused and held hostage by Hamas.

I’ve always had the feeling that Michelle Obama could be a huge force for progress, but a misplaced preoccupation with being hard done by and discriminated against dramatically limits her both as a symbol and a human being. In the pantheon of first ladies I’d like to meet, I can’t think of one further down the list.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s December 22, 2025 World edition.