Ikram Goldman, the Chicago boutique owner, styled the first lady of the USA  Michelle Obama for most of her important engagments in the office, from her husband Barack Obama’s campaign for the presidency in 2008 and their first two years in the White House.  she shares her memories here.

“A friend of ours, Desirée Rogers [who would go on to become President Obama’s White House Social Secretary], was the one who introduced me to Michelle years ago, and we just developed a relationship. She became a client, then she became a senator’s wife, then she became First Lady, and the relationship continued. Trust came early on from working on the basic things. We started out with a black dress, a black pant, a black jacket, a white shirt, a black skirt, and we mixed those things together and made them work for a long time, for a lot of meetings.

I was very clear and very cognizant in thinking through each piece and where Mrs. Obama was wearing it and how and why. During the campaign she was appearing on [The Tonight Show With] Jay Leno. I talked to Josh [my husband] about it. I said, “It’s got to be something really low price. It’s got to be something like J.Crew,” and Josh says, “Brilliant. J.Crew it is.” So I go to J.Crew, I picked out a bunch of things; I picked out the gold outfit, the skirt with the cardigan and top. I said to Michelle, “The first thing Jay Leno is going to ask you is ‘what are you wearing?’ And you’re going to say J.Crew.” She says, “He’s not going to ask me that.” And then, the first thing he asked her was, “What are you wearing?” And she looked in the camera like she was looking at me, and [later] she said, “How did you know?” I said, “I just know.”

It was instinctual for me. It was what would I want my sister, my best friend, my daughter to do? Not only what would I want them to do, but also, what do I want to see? What the right message was.

Michelle was fun to watch. She gave women the confidence to dress and express themselves in a way that made them feel comfortable, because she is an extraordinary, happy, and wonderful person. That exudes, and fashion just adds to it. You can’t have great fashion without a great attitude.

There’s a funny story about the first inauguration gown, the white Jason Wu. Everybody wanted to know what dress it was, what dress it was, what dress it was, what dress it was. I kept saying, “I’m not telling anybody.” And the reason I didn’t want to tell anybody was because if last minute something happened and we had to change it and we couldn’t change it because she was pigeonholed into wearing that dress, that would’ve been a disaster for her. I wanted to give her the out to wear what she wanted to wear. We knew what she was going to wear, but I wanted her to have two or three backups. That was really important to me, to have the backups.

Michelle Obama wears Jason Wu to her husband’s first inauguration, January 2009

No one was allowed to see it. I go to Washington [D.C.], and I had the inauguration dress wrapped up in a tiny little bag in my backpack with her jewelry and everything she was going to wear that night. I walked with that dress crumpled up in my backpack to watch the President get sworn in, and I had to go through checkpoints where they had to clean out my bag. They were going to open up the clear bag with the white dress, and I was like, “I wouldn’t do that if I were you; I would not open that up. You can run it through the machine, and if you see anything you can open it up, but there’s nothing here for you.” So, every checkpoint that I was going through, they would clear my bag, take the bag that the dress was in out of my bag, and put it back, but they never opened it up, they never saw what it was. Josh and I laughed. Oberon and Aragon [our twin sons] were two weeks old at the time, they were in pouches on our bellies, and we were walking through the checkpoints, [thinking,] “Oh my god, do they know they just touched the most talked-about piece of fashion the country wants to see in this moment?”

The same thing would happen when we’d go into the White House. I’d bring my own groceries because I like to eat a certain way. We’d have all these bags with pins and needles and grocery bags, and the security guards would go through everything meticulously. Dates, almond butter, chocolate chip cookies. I’d go with Ines Scalise, my right hand and Helen Anagnostopoulos, my seamstress for 20; years, and we’d laugh: It’s just food.

Jason Wu didn’t know the dress was for the First Lady. He had no idea. He called me when he saw it on TV and was bawling his eyes out. I was sitting at the White House and I got the call from him crying. He said, “I can’t believe she’s wearing my dress.” Narciso [Rodriguez] didn’t know; Isabel Toledo didn’t know. I really kept it, as I have for the past eight years, I kept it quiet—very honorable and very quiet.

The most important thing to me is that my clients feel as empowered and as beautiful in their clothes as they feel on the inside. And if the message is inconsistent, then that’s a no-no. When she did the [first] Vogue story in 2009 for the March issue, the White House was clear: Go through Ikram on all of this. I got an email from Tonne [Goodman, Vogue’s Fashion Director], saying, “I’ve got all these clothes.” I said, “Unfortunately, we’re not going to use your clothes. We need to use the clothes we have and the message has to stay very clear: high and low, and we want to represent the designers that we want to represent.” I wasn’t being disrespectful to the magazine, but we couldn’t veer off message; it had to stay on message. We did a Wu dress on the cover, and inside she was wearing J.Crew and Gap.

I didn’t want her to feel fragile and untouchable. I wanted women to know that they can look like Mrs. Obama. There’s no question that she wasn’t thinking about that, too.

Mrs. Obama is a confident and easygoing human being. Because she came with that confidence, it was easy to dress her. You didn’t argue about a Junya Watanabe cardigan with a big skirt from Michael Kors. She was confident, and the clothes were just an extension of what she already is. They were playful and fun and honest; those are all the things she is. The Jimmy Choo shoes she wore were planted in the ground. They weren’t shoes that would kill her; they looked great but were also utilitarian and comfortable, which is really important when you’re dressing anybody at that level. All those things were really her personality. I was just a vehicle for her to access the things she loved the most. Yes, did I engage her in the idea of wearing something a little more off the beaten path? Of course. And did she embrace it? Of course.

The Azzedine Alaïa cardigan she wore to [meet] the Queen of England—people wrote all kinds of things about it, saying she should’ve worn a long-sleeved dress. Meanwhile, she looked absolutely beautiful. I still put people in a cardigan. I didn’t know what the big brouhaha was about.

I stepped away in the cleanest way; I made sure she was taken care of and set up. I hired a saleswoman at my store [Meredith Koop] and told Michelle she would be the perfect person to facilitate what’s already in place.

There’s no question, it was an honor and a privilege to have dressed Michelle Obama, who then became the First Lady. But it would’ve been an honor and a privilege regardless. To me, it’s a privilege to be able to dress the women who trust me to help them represent themselves every day. That is a huge honor for me.

What’s really incredible, when I look back, my children will see this and they’ll say, “My mom had something to do with this,” or my husband. It’s a privilege and an honor knowing that people have thought about it, and they know that I did it from the heart, and that this is something that made history along the way.”

Source: Vogue

Photo Credit: Vogue