IT was a day before the New York Fashion Week and politics got in the way. “We would love to dress Michelle Obama,” said Bud Konheim, the CEO of Nicole Miller, referring to the Harvard-trained lawyer wife of Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama.
The topic somehow crept up while he was showing a group of foreign journalists a photograph of Angelina Jolie wearing Nicole Miller in 2005 (which, by the way, boosted sales of that same dress. “We sold thousands,” Konheim said.)
The 44-year-old Michelle, according to him, appeared confident with a good sense of style.
“She doesn’t look like she tries to be safe,” he said of Michelle, the mother of two daughters aged five and eight, who is just one inch short of being a six-footer. “She isn’t afraid to wear prints.”
What about Hillary Clinton, one-half of the famous Billary (Bill and Hillary) that is sometimes also labelled a two-headed monster?
“She doesn’t dress like she is interested in clothes,” Konheim said. New York-based Nicole Miller was among some 80 top names that took part in what is officially known as the Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week that ended yesterday. Malaysia’s Yeohlee and Zang Toi were on the roll-call, too. Recently, Hillary reportedly backed out of a photo shoot with Vogue out of concern that she might appear too feminine. This led to retaliation from its editor-in-chief, the indomitable fashion guru Anna Wintour. “The notion that a contemporary woman must look mannish in order to be taken seriously as a seeker of power is frankly dismaying,” she wrote in this month’s issue. “This is America, not Saudi Arabia. It’s also 2008. Margaret Thatcher may have looked terrific in a blue power suit, but that was 20 years ago.” ABC News ran a story titled “Super Style: Barack vs Hillary”, suggesting that “the business of image is front and centre” and that style was a priority. But for now, fashion has to take a back seat for these two presidential contenders. Unlike the Republican presidential race in which John McCain seems a safe bet after the Super Tuesday showdown, the two Democratic rivals are still locking horns. (Incidentally, the intrigue of Super Tuesday was edged out in the tabloids for two days when the underdog New York Giants defeated New England Patriots in the Super Bowl. It was frontpage news, kicking out politics. New Yorkers were beside themselves when a parade was held on Tuesday to welcome their footballers as adults skipped work and children missed classes just to see their heroes.) With no runaway winner yet in the Democratic battle for the nomination, the fight looks set to spill over to other states such as Louisiana, Maine, Washington, Maryland, Virginia and Wisconsin. “There will be a long period of uncertainty for the Democratic Party,” said Maurice Carroll, who is director of the Polling Institute. Carroll, who has clocked 40 years of experience as a political writer, said Obama and Clinton were essentially almost similar although their message was one of “change” versus “experience”. “Ideological difference? Zilch. It is a matter of who you think will make a better president,” he told a briefing for foreign journalists on Tuesday. Obama, he added, was a good speaker and mobilised young people. “He is a very attractive candidate,” he said. No wonder then that a former classmate of Obama was quoted by ABC News describing him as “fresh, young and inspirational. I often find his tall elegant stature reminiscent of that of a model in a Dior or Lanvin fashion show.” Fashion, though, is surely the last thing on Obama’s mind right now.
