Michelle Obama said she used fashion in the White House as a deliberate tool to communicate values, amplify emerging designers, and “show America’s first Black First Lady” to a wider audience. 

In a new essay for The Cut, Obama wrote that when headlines chased her clothes instead of her work, she decided style would become a strategy to highlight issues and people she cared about.

She opened the essay with a memory of the Norman Rockwell painting of Ruby Bridges — an image she said captured how appearance can proclaim belonging and possibility. The painting framed her argument: clothes aren’t frivolous; they send messages about who we are and what we believe. 

Obama also reflected on using magazine covers and state dinner gowns to push visibility for designers from nontraditional backgrounds and to spotlight industries that employ immigrant artisans. “If people wanted to see what I was wearing, I wanted them to also see the courageous military mom I was standing next to,” she wrote.

She admitted that her relationship to public scrutiny evolved and noted that she once felt braids were a “bridge too far” for the White House, but she doesn’t feel the same way now. She said, “I wear what I want. I do my hair how I want.” That shift, she argued, is part of a larger lesson: appearance can be an act of resistance and a way to reclaim dignity.

Michelle Obama’s new book of photographs and stories, “Michelle Obama’s The Look,” is out on Nov. 4, and these essays offer a blueprint for how public figures can use style to shape cultural conversations.