How First Ladies Became America’s Original Style Ambassadors
3 min readStyle Points is a weekly column about how fashion intersects with the wider world.
Elizabeth Keckley was born into slavery in 1818. After she was freed in 1852, the Virginia native relocated to Washington, D.C., and built a thriving dressmaking business in the nation’s capital. And soon, she became the personal dressmaker to Mary Todd Lincoln (as well as a close friend and confidante of the first lady). Lincoln had been criticized for her youthful and extravagant tastes—her love of long trains and off-the-shoulder silhouettes led her husband to quip that her dresses needed “a little less tail and little more neck.” Keckley’s designs fit the demand for wartime decorum, converting the onetime fashion plate to more subdued, clean-lined pieces.
Mary Todd Lincoln
Women like Keckley and Ann Lowe, a Black dressmaker who outfitted Jacqueline Kennedy, may not be as well-remembered as the public figures who wore their designs (though Lowe recently received a museum retrospective dedicated to her work). But they were crucial image makers who helped shape the look of some of the most visible women in politics.
Jacqueline Kennedy
Like it or not, deem commenting on them a waste of ink or not, first ladies’ fashion statements are taken as a semaphore for an administration’s values. And the savviest among them have used their style to advance a narrative. When John F. Kennedy emerged on the scene as the youthful, charismatic, hatless candidate, Jacqueline Kennedy supplemented that image with fresh, Mod-adjacent looks by designers like Oleg Cassini, securing her position as one of the best-dressed first ladies of all time.
Michelle Obama attends the Democratic National Convention in 2012 wearing a dress by Tracy Reese.
Decades later, Michelle Obama’s colorful, slightly preppy style coordinated perfectly with another young candidate running on a platform of change. Following the 2008 recession, she made a point of wearing affordable pieces from mass brands like J.Crew and “shopping her closet,” or normalizing outfit repeating. She also remained committed to wearing and supporting young American designers like Jason Wu and Brandon Maxwell. After publishing her book The Look last year, Obama reflected on that time in an interview with ELLE editor-in-chief Nina Garcia, saying that she was keenly aware that “fashion could define me before I defined myself,” and adding that she had a “strategy” for approaching her visual self-expression.
Even post-presidency, Obama has continued to use style as a way to convey meaning—most recently in the pieces she wore to the opening of the Obama Presidential Center, including a custom Acne Studios skirt that featured a portrait of her late mother.
Nancy Reagan
On the other side of the spectrum, Nancy Reagan’s wardrobe in the 1980s served as a visual echo of Ronald Reagan’s “Morning in America” slogan, evoking both the greed-is-good decade and retro, exaggerated femininity in pieces by Adolfo and James Galanos. Compared to Lincoln and Obama’s wartime and lean-times focus on simplicity, she ushered in unapologetic maximalism—and, as half of a Hollywood golden couple, brought some of that industry’s glamour to the nation’s capital.
Dolley Madison
Another White House maximalist was Dolley Madison, who favored rich brocades and ornamental turbans. Though she was raised as a Quaker and grew up dressing plainly, when she entered public life she quickly developed a taste for the Empire-waisted gowns that were so popular overseas—injecting a bit of European allure into her staid surroundings.
Jill Biden wears Markarian for Inauguration Day 2021.
When a message of unity is called for, a simple color can be all it takes to make a statement. When Joe Biden was inaugurated in 2021, some commentators believed that Jill Biden was nodding to the Democratic victory in a sparkling blue ensemble, while Vice President Kamala Harris’s choice of purple evoked a message of two sides coming together. What’s more verifiable is the fact that both Biden and Obama selected pieces by young American designers—Markarian’s Alexandra O’Neill and Sergio Hudson, respectively. While first ladies’ wardrobe choices can help underscore policy, they also play another important role: shining a light on the American fashion industry and the diverse group of designers—many of them immigrants—who make it great.