who are they wearing?

While serious folks like Wretchard at the Belmont Club are wondering who “sent” Obama, the more frivolous among us are spending a lot of time checking him (and his wife) out.

Or, rather, you’d think it was a frivolous trivial pursuit to parse the Obamas’ wardrobes, wouldn’t you? Well, think again.

On May 21, the New York Times blog Paper Cuts featured a much larger version of this picture:

The larger version highlights the book Obama is reading (Fareed Zakaria’s new bestseller), which is, presumably, why the photo was featured on a blog about books. A lot of the blog’s readers, however, were much more taken with the cool cat in the shades:

I’m sorry, but the future president of the USA looks like a rockstar. Check out the way that suit falls of his shoulder. I love this guy.

He looks right out of the original “Thomas Crown Affair”, the on with Steve McQueen. If only he could still smoke in public and not get harassed.

I was curious about the book and will now definitely
read it. And yeah, Becky, he looks fabulous. Can’t wait to see him and Michelle dressed up for the inaugural. Welcome back to glamour, America!

He’s lovely.

Keep in mind that these are readers of a New York Times blog, and thus presumably educated and interested in the issues and thus presumably not “low-information voters.” And yet they are responding from the gut, to the Obama image, which, as I’ve noted repeatedly, has been masterfully crafted by campaign adviser (and stage manager extraordinaire) David Axelrod.

So: what happened here? He looks so dorky!

As the New York Daily News reports, BHO got “poor marks” for this particular fashion statement:

It wasn’t a pretty picture: ill-fitting jeans, a tucked-in golf shirt, black-and-white socks and a helmet that could make Michael Dukakis blush.

“Please tell me he isn’t wearing dark socks,” commented one of many Internet fashionistas who weighed in on Obama’s recent ride along Lake Michigan with his wife, Michelle, and their two daughters, Sasha, 7, and Malia, 9.

“Barry is politically correct, wearing a nice helmet,” noted another, tongue firmly in cheek.

I guess Axelrod can’t be supervising Obama’s look 24/7. But in case you think that look isn’t important, check out this past Sunday’s NYT dissection of Michelle Obama’s wardrobe:

When Mr. Obama and his wife triumphantly took the stage in St. Paul Tuesday to claim the Democratic presidential nomination, the candidate, dressed in one of the crisp, neutral suits that have made him a GQ darling, was momentarily upstaged by his wife, and not just because she knuckle-bumped him in front of the world.

What grabbed the eye was the sleeveless purple silk crepe sheath made for Mrs. Obama by Maria Pinto, the former Geoffrey Beene assistant who has long been an Obama favorite. Simple in silhouette and, at about $900 retail, not the kind of garment most working-class voters can reasonably aspire to, the dress was immediately subject to water cooler dissection.

Let us remember that politics is showbiz. David Axelrod certainly knows that, and so he tends to his candidate’s image—and most likely that of the candidate’s wife as well. The Times dances around the issue:

Michelle Obama apparently pulls off the feat of getting dressed on her own.

“To the best of my knowledge, she does not use a stylist,” said Mrs. Obama’s spokeswoman, Katie McCormick Lelyveld, although the candidate’s wife is known to have ties to the designer Ms. Pinto and to Ikram Goldman, the owner of Ikram, a Chicago specialty store. (Both declined to speak about the relationship.)

“What’s important here is that we’re not starting from zero with Michelle Obama,” said Ms. Collins of Vanity Fair. “I’m sure she’s being advised. But there’s nothing imposed on her that isn’t generated by who she is. She has a very definite sense of herself.”

Fashion maven Andre Leon Talley does not dance around the issue at all:

“Everyone knows that people respond to the way you look when you run for office,” André Leon Talley, an editor-at-large for Vogue, which featured Mrs. Obama as an “It” girl in its April issue, said last week in an interview. “A black Camelot moment is the right moment for the Obamas,” he added. “And so the faux pearls, the A-line dresses, the Jackie flip are obviously all part of how her image strategy has evolved.”

This is what Michelle Obama looked like ten years ago, when she dressed herself:

Today, she’s all Jackie:

Same bold colors, only now she’s part of the “black Camelot.” What a crock! And yet … and yet. The world of images is the world we live in, and image matters, as an expert quoted in the NYT reminds us [e.a.]:

“When you are operating at a national and even global level,” said Mikki Taylor, the beauty director and cover editor of Essence magazine, everything signifies. “No gesture is too small from now on,” Ms. Taylor said. “It’s all information. We’re all taking something from this look.”

Yes indeed. It all adds up, including—perhaps especially—the look.

As for who “sent” Obama … the jury’s still out. Ron Rosenbaum suggests, ever so obliquely, that he’s Prince Hal.