When Michelle Obama released her new fashion-book The Look, she framed it as a journey of style, identity and evolution. She says she wants to “reclaim” the story of what she wore, how she styled her hair and the scrutiny she faced as the first Black First Lady.
In particular, she laments how she felt under a “white-hot glare” and suggests that she and her husband, Barack Obama, were “being portrayed as Black people who didn’t understand the ‘rules’ of the rarefied world we had found ourselves in and were not unequivocally welcomed into.”
One of her most talked-about sections regards hair: “As women of color, the way our hair naturally grows out of our head is beautiful … But if we struggle to make it look like the standard, that means we are spending thousands of hours and lots of money straightening what is naturally curly hair.”
But here’s where the fashion show turns into something else: hours after the book’s release, conservative commentator Megyn Kelly went on the offensive.
She pointed out that Mrs. Obama is essentially saying that society’s standards prevent Black women from “just walking around with their natural hair.” Her retort was frank: “That is bulls**t.”
Kelly rightfully argued that every woman, irrespective of race, contends with hair styling pressure and that Mrs. Obama’s frame of victimhood is way overstated:
“Black women can walk around with whatever hair they want. Only in Michelle Obama’s warped mind do white people not like them unless their hair looks like white hair.”
“Virtually every woman I know spends a s**t ton of time on her hair and wants it to look better than God made it. It’s not a black thing. It’s a human thing, and it’s especially a woman thing… But she’s always reducing everything to race.”
The argument holds that many women, regardless of background, feel the pressure to meet aesthetic standards—hair, makeup, clothes, body image—because of pervasive cultural expectations, not solely because of racial bias. Framing this as a uniquely Black burden undermine shared agency and personal choice.
The assertion is that Mrs. Obama’s complaints about “grace” and being under a harsher glare seem disconnected from the tremendous privileges she enjoyed (White House residence, global recognition, media attention). Kelly points out that the Obamas were “on every magazine cover… treated like Camelot reincarnate.”
From this angle, the book seems less about fashion or empowerment and more about reframing life’s story through a lens of grievance.
Mrs. Obama even made sure her fashion choices stemmed from DEI:
“I thought about what I wanted to say with my fashion. I wanted to, you know, talk about inclusion, diversity, opening up opportunities.” She notes:
“The designers that I chose — there were young designers; there were women designers; there were also immigrant American designers… I was able to show the world the outstanding qualities of people who come from different places…”
It comes down to tone and framing. When a former First Lady with global fame writes about “not being ready” to wear braids or natural hair because “the country wasn’t ready,” one has to ask: who isn’t allowed what?
“I wasn’t sure whether the country was ready for it,” she writes of wearing braids as First Lady.
And then claims she and her husband “didn’t get the same fashionable ‘grace’ that other first ladies did.” According to Kelly, this is disingenuous:
“We weren’t as fascinated by her as she thinks we are.”
Mrs. Obama’s The Look could have been a compelling style memoir with cultural commentary—but instead it takes aim, repeatedly, at race and grievance. Meanwhile, the message is: “We were oppressed, so we couldn’t have had fun.” That mismatch of tone undermines what might otherwise have been an empowering project.
If Mrs. Obama aimed to reclaim a narrative, she may have just re-played the same script with new accessories.
