what they talking about...

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SNIP:
Published: December 24, 2009
IT’S been a tough year for fashion. The juice has been virtually squeezed out of it. Luxury retailers, after seeing margins erode like Nantucket beachfront, have leaned on designers to cut their prices. To stay afloat, design houses are reducing quality and promoting value. Meanwhile fast-fashion chains are eating their lunch as they reproduce runway looks in six weeks. As a symbol of self-inflicted misery, the listless, half-starved model may be perfect after all.
At least the fashion world had Michelle Obama and Sarah Palin to help avoid the impression that, you know, nobody cares about clothes and big dangly earrings. It’s hard to see now why so many columnists got their tights in a twist over Ms. Palin’s spending $75,000 of perfectly good Republican money at Neiman Marcus during the 2008 Republican convention. Have you seen Neiman’s numbers lately? After 18 straight months of declines, it wouldn’t be surprising to find a little shrine erected in Ms. Palin’s honor.
Editors and designers love Michelle Obama, of course. All those magazine covers; the Flotus Tactical Cardigan Collection at J. Crew; her glamorous face-off with Carla Sarkozy, the former model, in France, when both women dressed for the evening in French clothes (Mrs. Sarkozy in Dior, Mrs. Obama in Azzedine Alaïa). Jackie Kennedy, the other White House deity, had to give up her beloved Givenchy because her husband, seeking the support of labor unions, needed his wife to be seen in American-made clothes.
Mrs. Obama, though, has successfully separated the personal from the political. Indeed, the only thing more surprising than the storm over Ms. Palin’s “Pretty Woman” makeover is that almost no one has raised an eyebrow over Mrs. Obama’s wearing of non-American labels, which include Nina Ricci and Junya Watanabe, and some of the most expensive at that.
Maybe the politicos don’t know a Junya from a Juicy, though you can bet that Mrs. Obama and Desirée Rogers, the White House social secretary, do. And maybe the world has gone flat, largely paving over the distinctions, geographical as well as moral and ethical, about where clothing is made. But with garment factories in New York closing on a steady basis, with people losing their jobs in retail and fashion, it’s a hard distinction to sell this year.
Anyway, Mrs. Obama has made it clear that her well-stocked closet is her business. Last March, in an interview about the new White House organic garden, she took a playful poke at her husband. “He doesn’t understand fashion,” she said. “He’s always asking, ‘Is that new? I haven’t seen that before.’ It’s like: ‘Why don’t you mind your own business? Solve world hunger. Get out of my closet.’ ”
Lots of working women who spend their own money for their clothes would identify with that. But I’ve been thinking about those women, and it seems to me that Sarah Palin, and not Mrs. Obama, is closer to how most of them dress. (Obviously this is not a discussion about Ms. Palin’s political views or intellectual gifts, so stay out of my fashion story.)
I like the way she dresses. The straight skirt and white blouse, the trim jacket with an open neck and three-quarter sleeves — the look is clean, tailored and energetic. It’s businesslike without being boring, smart without being insider. You don’t need to read a fashion magazine to understand it. That was how Ms. Palin dressed on her book tour. And it’s the way a lot women would like to dress, and probably do, when they don’t have time or many choices and think that accessories always wind up looking prissy.
read it all here..
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/27/fashion/27LADIES.html?_r=1