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Hanna and Dayo: Ouch. Imagine if Michelle Obama had been caught breaking ground on her victory garden in her mommy jeans and a plaid shirt. “What a Hag!” the headlines would read. “E-I-E-I-No!” She couldn't show arms. She couldn't wear pearls. So she opted to do what all women do when they have no good fashion choices: She wore plain, skinny, well-fitting black clothes and hoped her wardrobe would fade out behind the 23 fifth graders from Bancroft Elementary School with their shovels and wheelbarrows and puffy coats. No such luck.
The Obama crop isn’t just slated to “delicately garnish the plates of dignitaries.” The plan is to send produce along to Miriam’s Kitchen, a local soup kitchen. This is a nice small lesson in stewardship and compassion that’s been spun as elitist and anti-feminist and inauthentic and out-of-touch because that’s how we talk about nice small gestures. Maybe there really is nothing to wear for those occasions on which one can do nothing right.
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Hanna, I agree in part with your assessment of the nation’s general judginess when it comes to feminism and FLOTUS fashion—but think it’s totally valid to critique Michelle Obama’s choice of attire when it comes to planting what’s essentially a victory garden for the nation.
In black boots, a black sweater, and the obligatorily cinched waist, Obama looked great, but absolutely unfit for the task at hand. I know plenty of women (myself included) who would rather wear a cute outfit than dungarees, especially when there are cameras around—but the posh outfit seemed only to underscore the posh surroundings and the sense that this vegetable garden was more photo op than a testament to the FLOTUS’ farming fetish.
Herbs from this garden will delicately garnish the plates of dignitaries and assorted diners at the White House. Maybe some of that lettuce will make it into the first daughters’ sandwiches. But this ain’t subsistence farming (see this intriguing NYT video essay for what a real victory garden looks like). So was the outfit a) a calculated middle finger to mores that expect a woman to have a green thumb? b) A naked push to look fab for history? Or, perhaps c) a glimpse of Obama as a model in her own public service ad campaign—dressed to the nines, as we expect mannequins to be—but selling a product she would never use? Maybe all three, but c) is anything but revolutionary.
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This weekend, I sat through a couple of heated discussions about that photo on the front page of Saturday's New York Times, showing Michelle breaking ground for that vegetable garden on the South Lawn. The views divided roughly between: a) annoyed feminists, who said some version of: "enough with the happy shots of kiddies swinging and mom planting vegetables. What will they bring out next? The checkered apron? After all, in Chicago it was Michelle who wore the pants in the family." And then b) enviros, who said some verion of : "Cool! They finally got that vegetable garden on the South Lawn."
As for me, I'm mostly taken by the unspoken irony I read in the photo. Despite what readers of the New York Times think (and the White House, apparently), this urban locavore movement is something that's gospel among a small percentage of people who can afford to shop at the farmer's market (see example of excesses of movement here). Most people, I think, just go to Wal-Mart and plant pansies on the front lawn.
And while Michelle is concerned about childhood obesity, she doesn't strike me as a rip-up-the-front-lawn kind of gal. How do I know this? Look at what she's wearing. Those could be muck boots but I believe they have heels. And she's in a long sweater, fashionably belted, and all black. And her hair looks perfect. Ladybird at least put on some gardening gloves and a sun hat for the photos. Michelle looks like she's impatient to get to dinner. Between this and the sleeveless gowns, I'm beginning to think Michelle rebels against the strictures of first lady life silently, through her outfits, the sartorial equivalents of a middle finger.
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