Womens’ Wear Daily commissioned top designers to ‘dress’ Michelle Obama in her role as First Lady. I’m with Slate’s Julia Turner: Why’d so many draw her as a shiksa?
I get that these drawings are stylizations but, to design for someone individually sorta requires you to deal with their skin tone, right? Would they drape a ‘winter’ in ‘summer’ colors? A few of the drawings make her downright Nubian, but a suspicious few too many have re-imagined her no darker than a color best described as “geisha”.
Why? When they design for white folks, do the skin tones in the drawings vary far from alabaster? One hates to get all psychological on a Thursday, but are these artists ‘helping’ her by making her whiter (and thus ‘capable’ of beauty) or are they so squeamish in imagining a sister in couture that they have to whitewash her to make her ‘worthy’ of high fashion?
Check out the drawings yourself. Maybe I’m overreacting.
Nah. We’re looking at some Freudian slips here.
