A change is coming

New York — People are changing, my dear friends. Tom Wolfe’s New York has come and gone. And all for the better. In its place is a city more obsessed with the sentimentality of experience as opposed to the fleeting five-minute high of the cash register’s ka-ching. The unemployed are volunteering and good money is being spent not on bottle service, but on cooking classes. Men are taking their women to Broadway in lieu of Bulgari. Picnic-in-the-park plans are being laid out in advance. Dinner parties abound, potluck of course. And reading is back in style.

If anything, the Great Recession will be remembered in years to come as the crisis that made people think — a worthwhile preoccupation that hasn’t been popular since the beginning of the boom years in the late ’80s. And all that thinking has led to a palpable shift toward real value and longevity.

In the food business, cuts of meat are no longer being purchased for their aesthetic merit on a plate — nutritional value and nourishment now come first, a shocking surprise to the visually-minded New Yorker. Even fashion has become more austere. Impeccably-made tailored pieces sell over the cut-and-sew trendy ones that dominated the pre-recession runways. Net-a-porter has just launched The Outnet. And the first Balenciaga outlet in the United States is selling $800 Matelasse handbags.

The end of the overly — and gaudily — styled celebrity has come. Of course, with this sudden burst of enlightenment came the need for a more formidable female figure. Nobody looks up to skinny Fifth Avenue charity gala housewives in times like these.

Enter Michelle Obama. And her sculpted arms.

Nicknamed “Mighty Michelle,” the United States First Lady is a Princeton and Harvard graduate — a lawyer in her own right. She is the mother of two, a Capricorn and fashion’s latest, most deserving darling. People are just crazy about her. And rightly so. Finally, here is a smart woman with actual curves in the spotlight — gracing the coveted cover of Vogue no less. A woman who is comfortable with herself and confident about her own style — someone who is not trivial enough to fret over the criticisms of her clothes. Here is a First Lady who wears Junya Watanabe, Moschino, Alexander McQueen and Jason Wu — a fashion daring Hillary, Laura or Barbara would never have been able to pull off. Here is a mom who can work the belt-over-a-cardigan look.

In a Wall Street Journal interview, Vogue editor Anna Wintour spoke highly of Mrs. Obama and praised her sartorial efforts, saying, “She wears clothes beautifully. They always look like they belong to her. It’s extraordinarily refreshing, and it’s empowering for women all over the world… Working with other brilliant people in Washington previously, I felt they’ve been nervous about clothes, about being criticized and not taken seriously. Washington has been very conservative. But I think now we have a beautiful and brilliant First Lady, who loves clothes and enjoys them, and she is going to send that message to women all over America — they can wear beautiful clothes and still be taken seriously.”

Michelle Obama is 2009’s new star

The Mobama mania is everywhere. There’s the Michelle Style book by Mandi Norwood. There are blogs — New York magazine’s being one of the most followed. There’s the Mrs-O.org website and its Facebook companion. There is last week’s Time cover and several other magazine covers before that. And just a few weeks ago, a talk was held in the Times Center where Times fashion critic Cathy Horyn discussed the First Lady’s style with Thakoon Panichgul, Narciso Rodriguez and Maria Cornejo, three of the First Lady’s preferred designers.

Up for discussion were Michelle’s “real woman” appeal and her veering away from the style of First Ladies before her. Finally, a First Lady who just did away with “the helmet hair,” Rodriguez said. Her clothes are purchased from several designers, including non-American ones — a practice which apparently was not popular with the much older generation of First Ladies. And more importantly, she experiments and doesn’t stick with the swankier, older labels — or the “dinosaurs of Seventh Avenue” as Cornejo put it. She also doesn’t characterize her style by putting on a uniform the way Hillary Clinton did with those pantsuits. It was noted that she went high and low — wearing J. Crew without looking like a Stepford Wife. “Michelle is a woman who loves fashion but is not trivialized by it,” Horyn said. It was observed how she isn’t afraid of fashion or committing sartorial mistakes. When asked if the designers would design for the First Lady had the election had gone the other way, Cornejo said, “No way! I have principles.”

If you are a close Mobama watcher, you will notice how Michelle is without the baggage of feminism (Hillary) or the annoying invisible demureness (Laura) of First Ladies before her. Here is someone who is just right with the perfect combination of smarts and beauty — the anti-thesis to the image of the inaccessible and often dowdy First Lady.

Finally, a fine specimen of a fashion icon.

Call it a revolution.