didn’t want for my daughters. I couldn’t contain my irritation. To me, it made no sense. We had agents standing in practically every hallway of the White House. I could look out the window and see Secret Service vehicles parked in the circular drive. But for some reason, she couldn’t just get my permission and head off to join her friends. Nothing could be done without her detail leader.
“This isn’t how families work or how ice cream runs work,” I said. “If you’re going to protect a kid, you’ve got to be able to move like a kid.” I went on to insist that the agents revise their protocols so that in the future Malia and Sasha could leave the White House safely and without some massive advance planning effort. For me, it was another small test of the boundaries. Barack and I had by now let go of the idea that we could be spontaneous. We’d surrendered to the idea that there was no longer room for impulsiveness and whimsy in our own lives. But for our girls, we’d fight to keep that possibility alive.
* * *
Sometime during Barack’s campaign, people had begun paying attention to my clothes. Or at least the media paid attention, which led fashion bloggers to pay attention, which seemed then to provoke all manner of commentary across the internet. I don’t know why this was, exactly—possibly because I’m tall and unafraid of bold patterns—but so it seemed to be.
When I wore flats instead of heels, it got reported in the news. My pearls, my belts, my cardigans, my off-the-rack dresses from J.Crew, my apparently brave choice of white for an inaugural gown—all seemed to trigger a slew of opinions and instant feedback. I wore a sleeveless aubergine dress to Barack’s address to the joint session of Congress and a sleeveless black sheath dress for my official White House photo, and suddenly my arms were making headlines. Late in the summer of 2009, we went on a family trip in the Grand Canyon, and I was lambasted for an apparent lack of dignity when I was photographed getting off Air Force One (in 106-degree heat, I might add) dressed in a pair of shorts.
It seemed that my clothes mattered more to people than anything I had to say. In London, I’d stepped offstage after having been moved to tears while speaking to the girls at the Elizabeth Garrett Anderson School, only to learn that the first question directed to one of my staffers by a reporter covering the event had been “Who made her dress?”
This stuff got me down, but I tried to reframe it as an opportunity to learn, to use what power I could find inside a situation I’d never have chosen for myself. If people flipped through a magazine primarily to see the clothes I was wearing, I hoped they’d also see the military spouse standing next to me or read what I had to say about children’s health. When Vogue proposed putting me on the cover of the magazine shortly after Barack was elected, my team had debated whether it would make me seem frivolous or elitist during a time of economic worry, but in the end we’d decided to go ahead with it. It mattered every time a woman of color showed up on the cover of a magazine. Also, I insisted on choosing my own outfits, wearing dresses by Jason Wu and Narciso Rodriguez, a gifted Latino designer, for the photo shoot.
I knew a little about fashion, but not a lot. As a working mother, I’d really been too busy to put much thought into what I wore. During the campaign, I’d done most of my shopping at a boutique in Chicago where I’d had the good fortune of meeting a young sales associate named Meredith Koop. Meredith, who’d been raised in St. Louis, was sharp and knowledgeable about different designers and had a playful sense of color and texture. After Barack’s election, I was able to persuade her to move to Washington and work with me as a personal aide and wardrobe stylist. Very quickly, she also became a trusted friend.
A couple of times a month, Meredith would roll several big racks of clothing into my dressing room in the residence, and we’d spend an hour or two trying things on, pairing outfits with whatever was on my schedule in the coming weeks. I paid for all my own