André Leon Talley.

André Leon Talley, Vogue’s bigger-than-life fashionisto, has moved away a bit from the mega-magazine (he is no longer editor at large at Vogue but is instead editor at large at the Russian edition of Numero) and is now pursuing reality TV and, on the flip side, books. Mr. Talley will be signing his new 184-page tome—which tackles fashion’s favorite subject: the Little Black Dress—at Bookmarc, as well as happily posing for iPhone photos that you can Instagram seconds later and hashtag “The September Issue star.” It evidently only took Mr. Talley two months to complete the coffee-table-ready hardbound beauty, which includes 80 pages of black-and-white photographs and essays by Robin Givhan and Maureen Dowd. The Rizzoli book was created as an accompaniment to Mr. Talley’s exhibit on that perfect little black dress at the Savannah College of Art and Design’s SCAD Museum of Art.

Bookmarc, 400 Bleecker Street, (212) 620-4021, 6pm-8pm.

Illustration by Jason Seiler

Amid all the speculation about Barack Obama’s newfound mojo, a hotly anticipated stiffening of his political spine inspired by his decisive victory in November, a somewhat more intriguing question has scarcely been asked.

Will Michelle finally step out?

The Harvard-trained attorney has always been, for those on the right, a more threatening character than her husband. After all, Mr. Obama merely received that famous fist bump—or as Fox News had it, “terrorist fist jab”—in the moments before delivering his speech at the Democratic National Convention; Michelle initiated it. It was she who revealed that the future president woke up “snore-y and stinky” in the morning, part of the campaign’s aggressive bid to humanize him that had the side effect of further elevating her (After all, if America’s demigod wakes up less than perfect, what would she think of us?) And it was Michelle who included a line about how the nation is “just downright mean” and “guided by fear”—in her 2008 stump speech—and once notoriously allowed that she was “for the first time in my adult lifetime ... really proud of my country.” And, of course, it was Michelle who finally extended the right to “bare arms” to political spouses and, as the Times Style section put it, “spurred an epidemic of sleevelessness.”

My goodness, the guns on that woman!

Whether the infamous “whitey” video—a Holy Grail of the right, in which Michelle is said to employ the dated epithet—ever existed at all outside the fever dreams of dirty trickster Roger Stone Jr. (which it almost definitely did not), the first lady has worked hard to dispel our fears. Over the last four years, the perceived Angela Davis-style radical has been replaced by a smoothly competent political professional, whose causes seem more Lady Bird Johnson than Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Not that there haven’t been a few missteps: wearing Lanvin sneakers to a food bank, eating Shake Shack (albeit in moderation) despite her healthy-food exhortations and hugging Queen Elizabeth. In general, though, Ms. Obama has been a notably careful FLOTUS, campaigning for exercise (what could be less controversial than that?) and embodying the role of wholesome mom-in-chief. Far from reinventing the job of first lady, the first black woman to set up house in the East Wing has turned out to be something of a traditionalist. At least so far. Now, with the exigencies of a second presidential campaign behind her, some are hoping Ms. Obama will finally let her freak flag—whatever that might look like—fly.

“There’s this sense that the real Michelle Obama, this endearingly frank woman we met in the spring of 2008, is going to come back to the fore,” noted New York Times reporter Jodi Kantor. “I think any change in her during the presidency is going to be one of degree. The real change is going to be in the post-presidency. Once she’s out of the White House and her husband will no longer hold office, she truly will be liberated. She will still be a young woman, and she’ll be one of the most famous and influential women in the world.”

“For first ladies, I do think second terms tend to be a bit more interesting,” said Daily Beast fashion writer Robin Givhan, whose beat is the intersection of style and politics and who has often written about Michelle. “It was in the second term when Laura Bush spoke out about Burma. So I will be intrigued to see if Mrs. Obama decides that she’s going to add a third leg to her platform, which now is divided between the support of military personnel and the Let’s Move campaign.”

While Ms. Givhan declined to speculate as to what that third project might be, conservatives are plainly terrified. As a piece on Right Side News ominously put it, “Much like Hillary, she will be assigned more involvement in affairs of state, appointed to committees, and public appearances of a political nature will become more frequent, not to speak of a barrage of friendly television repartee on shows like The View, late night talk, and more. In essence, the grooming will begin.”

Blame Ms. Clinton for the lofty expectations: the former first lady-turned-well-liked senator-turned-presidential candidate-turned-secretary of state-turned-beloved Internet meme is the new paradigm for first ladies. (Even Laura Bush, the very picture of a traditional political spouse, went on an extensive book tour in 2010, during which she spoke out on her policy differences from her husband. Turns out she’s pro-gay marriage and supports Roe v. Wade!)

Ms. Obama, in spite of her rather rocky introduction, has the skill set of a politician, as she amply demonstrated with her 2012 Democratic National Convention speech, in which she passionately recounted the story of her early marriage and her dad’s health struggles, making Ann Romney’s tuna-salad recollections look hopelessly drab and out of touch. Though Ms. Obama was hardly the first first lady to get an advanced degree or work outside the home—Laura Bush has a master’s and was a teacher and librarian, and Nancy Davis acted in films after her marriage to Ronald Reagan—she was the first one to have a higher-profile career than her husband for a time. While Barack was working on his memoir and commuting between Chicago and Springfield as a state senator, Michelle was climbing the ladder at the University of Chicago Hospitals system; even when he became a U.S. senator, she was the spouse bringing home the real bacon. It’s not surprising that with Illinois Senator Mark Kirk up for re-election in 2016, speculation has already emerged that Michelle will make a run at the seat. A recent poll had her trouncing the Republican 51 to 40 percent. Trouble is, the first lady may not be interested.

In her book The Obamas, Ms. Kantor reported that Michelle Obama strongly considered the idea of remaining in Chicago and letting Barry turn the White House into a bachelor pad in order to allow little Sasha and Malia to continue their school year in Chicago. “It’s hard to overstate how little she wanted to go into politics,” Ms. Kantor told The Observer, “and it wasn’t just because of the family reasons she sometimes cites. She had a real objection to the nature of politics. She thought it wasn’t the right way to create social change.”

She’s disappointed liberals before. Many expected her to advocate strongly for progressive causes during her husband’s first term, but she largely kept quiet. Historian and America’s First Ladies author Betty Boyd Caroli said that she’d expected Mrs. Obama to more aggressively champion the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act in 2009, for instance. “I was disappointed,” Ms. Caroli said. “I expected her to be Superwoman. But it doesn’t work that way. Enough voters, it is feared, are not ready.”

And blame Hillary Clinton for that, too, having so disastrously overreached with health-care reform. “Everybody learned a lesson from that. It’s not good to be too political as a first lady,” said Dr. Caroli. (The PR disaster was compounded by Mrs. Clinton’s maelstrom of press over everything from Whitewater to her ever-evolving hairdo, and the fact that her ambitions for a time outpaced her political talent.)

The result: Hillary entered the East Wing as a full-throated political player and left as a Vogue cover-girl and hostess.

“Hillary’s trajectory was the opposite of Michelle’s,” noted Rebecca Traister, the author of Big Girls Don’t Cry, a book about women and the 2008 election.

As for Ms. Obama, the conservative blogosphere still lights up with outrage whenever the healthy-eating crusader is seen nibbling a French fry, but the first lady’s childhood-obesity-prevention campaign Let’s Move and her advocacy on behalf of military families are not exactly Hillarycare. As Ms. Kantor noted, “There’s the question with Let’s Move about how aggressive and confrontational she was willing to be when it came to taking on corporate interests. With the military families initiative, is it rah-rah patriotic, or does it get into darker material? I’m curious to see how complete and thorough a conversation she wants to have with the country about the issues veterans face.”

In the first term, Mrs. Obama’s “mom-in-chief” moniker, derided by the left, allowed her to occupy an apolitical space. “There was some frustration among women, thinking she should do more,” said Anita McBride, former chief of staff to Laura Bush and a scholar of the history of first ladies. “But the women’s movement is about choice, and this was her choice.”

Others agree that Ms. Obama’s old-school approach during the first term was in itself somewhat radical. “I consider myself a feminist,” noted MSNBC host Melissa Harris-Perry. “But I’m also a critic of second-wave feminism, which was bourgeois, white middle class, and said that work done outside the home is the most liberating kind of work. That ignores the fact that through vast periods of U.S. history, black women were not provided the income or space that they could make that decision. I find it kind of subversive and interesting that a black woman with a law degree from Harvard who’d been the primary breadwinner through college said, ‘I’m going to do what generations of white women have done, do the Junior League kind of work.’”

But even Dr. Harris-Perry sees an untapped political potential in the first lady. She cited Ms. Obama’s work negotiating between the University of Chicago and the city’s South Side: “It’d be really interesting to see if she could navigate that at a higher level—bridging this gap between the powerful and well-resourced and those that are being denigrated.”

Besides, a certain distaste for politics might just turn out to be an asset, creating a sense that, should she venture into the arena, she would be doing it not because she wants to—heaven forbid—but because her country truly needs her. A “Michelle Obama 2016” T-shirt with a snazzy stars-and-bars design can be found for about $25 on Google Shopping.

Ms. Traister compared Michelle to another formerly nonpolitical person who ended up taking out a sitting Republican senator. “Elizabeth Warren is somebody who did not have a political career, who was tremendously influential in terms of how we see the chasm between rich and poor,” Ms. Traister noted. Ms. Obama, she said, “could get very active in immigration reform, she could start talking about climate change.”

Dr. Harris-Perry had a different role model in mind: a first lady who, as “a dutiful soldier,” kept silent about her disagreements with her husband during his presidency but campaigned vociferously as a conscience of the Democratic party in the years that followed: Eleanor Roosevelt. “She became the legacy; she held the Democrats’ feet to the fire. She was very active in party leadership,” Dr. Harris-Perry said, adding that Ms. Obama “might be able to be a kind of queen-maker for women running for office. I could see her on the campaign trail.”

“It’s very natural for that to be the next-step fantasy for people who appreciate her brilliance—oh, she’ll run for office!” Ms. Traister said. “One thing all those who want her to run could think about is other jobs she may want to have in her life, using her own model of working within communities. We need to be aware of is not letting her identity as a former first lady hold her back from having an independent life.”

Then again, you never know. Back in the 1990s, Dr. Caroli predicted that Hillary Clinton would never run for office: “She didn’t look at ease with groups of people,” she said. “But people change!”

And if they don’t, there’s always Sasha and Malia. 2040, perhaps?

Robin Givhan (Getty Images)

Newsweek/The Daily Beast's fashion critic, Robin Givhan, has published an essay today pleading for an end to the discussion of Michelle Obama's clothing--or, at least, "breathless, fanzine-style chronicling of her attire."

"[T]he flood of Joan Rivers-style verbiage about her day-to-day wardrobe has overwhelmed those nuanced conversations" about Ms. Obama's role as a fashion industry ambassador and the degree to which she could occupy both public and private lives.

The diatribe, consistent with Ms. Givhan's longstanding position on assessing clothes through a political lens (she won a Pulitzer for similar work at the Washington Post, and wrote a book on Ms. Obama's first year as First Lady), shares the page with a very apt example of the phenomenon Ms. Givhan decries. Just above the pullquote "Every garment is not symbolic. Every dress is not fraught with meaning" resides a link to the "Michelle Obama Lookbook," a 91-page slideshow of garments either devoid or possessed of meaning.

Either way, they're mesmerizing to click through.

Mr. Lagerfeld

In January, Newsweek style writer Robin Givhan published a thoughtful essay about the influence of fashion's foot-in-mouth Renaissance man Karl Lagerfeld.

"Karl Lagerfeld is overrated," it began. "Such a statement rings like heresy within a fashion universe where the highly acclaimed designer struts upon his lofty stage as the creative director of Chanel—but it’s true."

It rang like heresy to Mr. Lagerfeld, anyway. He's been punishing Newsweek boss Tina Brown for it ever since. 

While guest editing Metro last month, Mr. Lagerfeld took a break from calling Adele fat in order to claim that he'd "never heard" of Pulitzer Prize winner Ms. Givhan.

“I feel sorry for Tina Brown that her paper is really going dow," he said. "It’s so skinny, it’s really what we call a ‘diet issue’ because it has no advertising and she certainly will not get advertising with this kind of article. I’ve never heard of this journalist  before, except for what she had written about Mrs. Obama, which made me already not like her — the journalist, not Mrs. Obama.”

Ms. Givhan still secured an invite to the Chanel runway show earlier this month, but she was exiled from her perennial front row perch.

"A pair of binoculars might have helped," she told the Toronto Star. 

At a press conference today in Tokyo today, Mr. Lagerfeld took yet another swipe at Ms. Brown, according to WWD. It reports:

"Asked by a journalist from Indonesia what he made of a recent Newsweek story claiming that he is overrated, he fired back: 'First of all, Tina Brown's magazine is not doing well at all,' he said before ripping into the credibility of the story. 'She is dying,' he continued. 'I'm sorry for Tina Brown, who was such a success at Vanity Fair, to go down with a shitty little paper like this. I'm sorry.'"

When reached for comment, Newsweek spokesman Andrew Kirk told us:

"In the past year since Tina Brown took over as editor in chief of Newsweek, newsstand sales have increased 30% year on year, advertising pages have seen a 27% increase for the first quarter of 2012, we have over 2.2 million people engaged in our social media communities and perhaps the most telling indicator of the renewed vitality of Newsweek, subscription renewals, in a consistent state of decline since 2005, rose by 3% last year."

RANDOM CELEBS

Anthony Michael Hall (YES, Anthony Michael Hall!) was holding court with reporters and hangers-on/ Others milling about: Harvey Weinstein -- much taller than I had originally realized. He seemed rather jolly. Three of the four Queer Eye guys (Thom, Carson, and Kyan) were there, as was Top Chef winner Harold -- with a very cute girlfriend. Harumph. Austin Scarlett from Season One was there, and I spotted Emmett, Nick, Raymundo, the girl who got kicked off for not using her mother's scarf, and Daniel V.

Heidi looked gorgeous, pregnant, gorgeous, pregnant. Michael Kors's mom was there.

The order:

1) Jeffrey -- I was shocked by how much I loved his collection. It wasn't crazy rock and roll, but very feminine, and very cohesive. There was a definite thought and theme -- with really pretty and wearable dresses.

2) Uli - she wisely limited herself to just a few choice print dresses, all very pretty - got a great reception from the crowd. Had this one bikini/cover up dress that the model ripped off while walking down the runway that was hot, hot, hot.

3) Laura -- she is very pregnant. Her collection was VERY Laura -- almost all black and white, very tailored and narrow, lots of sparkle. I believe the word I used was "jazzercize". That said, quite possibly my favorite tied with Jeffrey.

4) Michael -- He is def the crowd's favorite -- and judging by the section nearest to me, a lot of loud female fans. His collection's theme was, I believe, "street safari", and much more hip-hoppy than previous collections.
—Sara Vilkomerson

I agree with this assessment completely, with the following additions/caveats:

1. Jeffrey's show was not THAT good. Too much weird shredding and Rebecca of Sunnybrook farms red tarpy-ness and too many horizontal zippers for my taste. I kept scanning the room for the Washington Post's Pulitzer Prize winning fashion critic Robin Givhan. Was she there? Was she thinking about what the regular woman would do with two rows of horizontal zipper on a shredded, sleeveless jean bolero? I was.

2. Speaking of Jeffreys: Zucker! NBC Universal president and -- if today's Page Six has any say -- imminently the next president of General Electric was front and center, opposite Heidi Klum, Michael Kors, Nina Garcia and celebrity (?) guest-judge Fern Mallis. Either he's out showing his support for the GE cable family (cough, cough, Jeff Immelt) or he's scouting a mid-season replacement for Heroes. Or he's a closet clothes-horse. I'd believe it!

3. There was a rumor going around that Project Runway was keeping journalists out of the show this year because we leak too many secrets. SPOILER ALERT: Michael's not gonna win.

4. Harvey Weinstein is NOT taller in person. If anything, he is skinnier. But just by a pound or two.
—Rebecca Dana

To the Editor:

Bruce Feirstein’s “Message From Mahmoud! Dear President Bush: We’ve Got Lots in Common” [New Yorker’s Diary, May 15] is truly trying to be funny, while comparing rotten apples with ripe California oranges. I read the letter from the President of Iran, and frankly, I didn’t think there were any people left with a measure of pure common sense and ordinary decency. But the letter from Iran was intelligent, logical and honest. The Western media has distorted, perverted and hyped it, while being grossly hypocritical. It is obviously true what Mr. Feirstein writes about President Bush, but what he writes about Mr. Mahmoud sounds disingenuous. The President of Iran is honorable and forthcoming. This is something unimaginable in our Western society. Therefore, comparing the two is grossly perverted.

Wayne Bent

Des Moines, N.M.

Ready to Wear Thin

To the Editor:

In Rebecca Dana’s article regarding Washington, D.C., fashion and trends [“The Smarmies of the Night,” May 8], she remarks: “In that village somewhere south of Staten Island, the hometown newspaper this year scored the first-ever Pulitzer Prize awarded to a fashion writer—The Washington Post’s Robin Givhan. Mustn’t that mean it’s time for New Yorkers to finally learn some fashion lessons from the District of Columbia, our much-maligned and terminally lame capital city?”

Robin Givhan of The Washington Post is a marvelously insightful social commenter in the role of a fashion critic. Admittedly, Washingtonians as a group are not known for being chic. We are traditionally (and tritely) maligned as dowdy and fashion-backward, especially by New Yorkers. However, rather than facetiously suggesting that it’s time to learn more about fashion from Washingtonians, as was the premise of Ms. Dana’s otherwise fairly amusing piece, Ms. Givhan’s Pulitzer suggests that it’s time for more fashion writers to realize their potential for greater depth in their coverage, to aspire to being as circumspect, substantive and worthy of the readers’ time.

A multigenerational native Washingtonian who loves both D.C. and New York, I freely acknowledge that D.C. isn’t as hip as you are—as if I cared. Nyah nyah nyah, over and out. We are certainly not as rich in fashion-related “assets.” But we do have Robin Givhan.

Elizabeth F. Stewart

Washington, D.C.

Alloy Is to Blame

To the Editor:

Thank you for assigning blame where it really belongs in this Viswanathan tale [“Viswanathan-athon: Plagiarizing Writer Fell in Weird Alloy,” Sheelah Kolhatkar, May 8]. I don’t know anyone personally, but from my experience in publishing, it seems the packager should be taking a lot more of the blame (and limelight) for this than an author, who was merely 17 when it all began. Publishing is a very insular business, and it is hard to imagine that a 17-year-old—no matter how brilliant—could understand all the implications of aligning with a packager, an agent and a publisher. One presumes that if the packager is getting nearly half the royalties and shared copyright credit, then they are also signing the contract and thus bear equal responsibility for the warranty clauses in the contract, which means verifying that there is no plagiarism. Shame on the owners of Alloy for not stepping forward, and for hanging the young girl out to dry in the press.

Barbara Moulton

San Francisco

It’s All History

To the Editor:

I enthusiastically concur with John Heilpern’s huzzahs for Alan Bennett’s The History Boys, and was especially intrigued by the parallels between the play’s milieu and Mr. Heilpern’s own British education [“Bennett’s The History Boys: Telling Witty Tales of School,” At the Theater, May 8]. Evidently, his lessons stopped short of the American musical theater, however: Just about any Broadway baby knows that “Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered,” however soignée it may be, is one of the many gems by Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart (Pal Joey), not, as Mr. Heilpern states, Cole Porter.

Dick Donahue

Manhattan

To Wit, Washington

To the Editor:

I read Chris Lehmann’s article on Stephen Colbert’s performance [“The Smarmies of the Night,” May 8]. I wasn’t there, but I and almost everyone I know have been laughing our asses off after watching it on the Internet. For someone to finally take on the President and the press (who have been almost equally dreadful) right there in person, using humor and irony, took such guts and intelligence that it elevates Mr. Colbert above everyone in politics and the media. Think about it—where have you seen such balls before?

Even if you didn’t find it funny, one has to admit it was historic in that sense. Things have gotten so bad that only humor can begin to relate what is going on, as well as the emotions that many Americans feel. In one shot, Mr. Colbert took on the President’s intelligence and leadership, the wimpy press and tyrannical TV news personas like Bill O’Reilly et al.

Yeah, the video at the end should have been cut, but the rest was amazing.

Brandon Kessler

Brooklyn