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    The Fierce Urgency of Chartreuse

    Posted Tuesday, January 20, 2009 1:46 PM | By Dana Stevens
    In the absence of any "ask not what your country can do for you"-grade catchphrase from Obama's speech (though I did love that flight of rhetoric at the end comparing our nation's current moment to winter in Valley Forge), can I free-associate about Michelle's dress and coat (which, as Julia points out, come from edgy Cuban-American designer Isabel Toledo)? What was most remarkable about her outfit was how unpolitically coded it seemed. It didn't quote any former first lady (no Reagan red, no Jackie Kennedy pillbox or cinched waist, no Democratic blue or bringing-it-together purple). The color was utterly weird and daring, a chartreuse-y yellow which, while it looked great with her coloring and the forest-green gloves she had on, seemed to carry no intrinsic message besides "I look awesome in this." Newsday would have it that, since Elizabethan times, yellow has symbolized hope, but this was no sunshine-y, baby-duck, Easter-morning yellow—it had an almost unsettling greenish cast, like absinthe, which set it apart from the wholesome primary colors seen on the other women on the podium (poet Elizabeth Alexander's red suit, Hillary's blue coat). To me, that dress was a reassuring message for those (including some of us here) who've feared that Michelle will have to disappear into bland First Ladydom.
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