It's no secret that fashion is not a diverse industry, and as New York's Amy Larocca points out, there was a conspicuous contrast between fashion's vocal support for our new president and the industry itself. "During the campaign, designers, from Marc Jacobs to Tory Burch, celebrated Obama in a frenzy of T-shirts and tote bags that conflated change and style. But despite such liberal goodwill, the industry is overwhelmingly white, both in its makeup and its view of its customer." Were diversity a matter of course, Italian Vogue's all black issue would not have been the huge cause for excitement that it was. And while that issue may have sparked a flurry of all-black fashion week shows and isolated celebrations of "the other," these were quite conscious exceptions. If Michelle Obama is to become a muse, in a certain sense it will serve as a rebuke: the embrace of a woman who's gotten where she is, stylistically and otherwise, in spite of the industry.

The other issue, says Larocca, is the role fashion plays in the First Lady's life, the fact that "she uses fashion but is not defined by her interest in it."

She’s no Jackie Kennedy, whose tenure as First Lady is remembered precisely for her interest in style. This seems an unlikely course for Michelle Obama. Here is a beautiful, well-dressed woman for whom fashion is a sidebar. Hers is the kind of résumé that can induce a certain self-hatred among people who’ve devoted their lives to tracking hemlines and hairdos.

Michelle's attitude seems to be an eminently sensible one: as long as one needs to wear clothes publicly, have fun with it, make them beautiful and interesting, champion smaller designers. But the need comes first, then the whimsy. At the end of the day, she doesn't live for fashion. And this, while probably the only way the industry can thrive in the coming years, is more novel than it should be.

The interesting question is what the high priests (and more to the point, priestesses) of the fashion world will do with this opportunity. Will they use it as a chance to see fashion and diversity embraced in a natural, organic and practical way, or will Michelle become an excuse, a solitary nod to difference that allows them to pat themselves on the back and then never put another black woman on the cover of Vogue for another two years? It's in some ways unfair to address Michelle Obama as anything but the individual she is, and yet the fervor with which fashion has embraced her does make one wonder: exactly what is it they want to be on board with? Just Michelle - which is, perhaps enough - or what she could start?
Michelle O [New York Magazine]

"'When you don't have your photo taken, you have to be very grown-up about it,' says Victoria Young, fashion director of Pop magazine. 'If you don't have your picture taken, and other people around you do, it feels very much like they're cool and you're not.'"

Okay, maybe, but if that's your goal, it's not like it's that hard to figure out what these blogs are looking for. As a rule the criteria are as follows:

-High Fashiony - a la The Sartorialist

-Ludicrous and Nylon-esque- a la Street Peeper

-Japanese - a la Style Arena.

-Old - a la Advanced Style

-Possibly mentally ill/homeless - a la any of them.

While the concept of the street style blog is unassailably awesome and a theoretical challenge to the prevailing dogma of the fashion mags, the truth is the standards really aren't that different — everyone's still young, thin and cool; and if they aren't there's something faintly behind-glassy and exploitative about them. Really, it's a sort of pernicious, inexorable high-fashioning of everyday life, and it's hard not to be ambivalent, however much we like the pictures. The more of these laconic Scandinavian 20-somethings and aging Italian fashionistos you look at, the more similar they all start to look. Ironically, the quest for the unique is only serving to reinforce the norm. And forget about the notion of self-expression; now the world's a runway and these folks are dressing for its collective eyes. Never mind that this trend is probably fast-tracking the death of any sartorial subcultures or actual attempts at rebellion — the cost of the internet age — it's ironically undermining the true point of eccentric fashion - in defiance of expectation.

I have been asked for my picture exactly once. The 'photographer' was maybe 15. I had gum in my hair and was wearing my glasses chain, which, according to the prevailing rules of the road (in which, as if it needs saying, privacy has no part) meant I was high-fashion. I was, I must admit, thrilled. But after she'd snapped the picture, there was a silence. "Um, maybe it's the lighting," she said politely. I peered at the wizened gnome on her camera's screen. Let's just say: There's a reason these blogs are filled with professional moddles.

Crowd Pleasers [The Guardian]