Michelle Obama on Outrage Over Her Bare Arms After Jackie Kennedy's Were Admired: 'It Wasn't the Clothes' (Exclusive) Janine RubensteinNovember 1, 2025 at 3:11 AM 0 Joyce N. Boghosian/The White House via Getty; Bettmann Archive/Getty Michelle Obama, Jackie Kennedy Michelle Obama gets candid about her style in new coffee table book The Look out Nov.
- - Michelle Obama on Outrage Over Her Bare Arms After Jackie Kennedy's Were Admired: 'It Wasn't the Clothes' (Exclusive)
Janine RubensteinNovember 1, 2025 at 3:11 AM
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Joyce N. Boghosian/The White House via Getty; Bettmann Archive/Getty
Michelle Obama, Jackie Kennedy -
Michelle Obama gets candid about her style in new coffee table book The Look out Nov. 4
The former first lady slams criticism of her sleeveless dresses and bare arms as 'pure hypocrisy' considering Jackie Kennedy's similar style choices
She also tells PEOLE what she really thought of her husband's infamous tan suit
Michelle Obama exercised her right to bare arms in the White House, but she wasn't the to do so.
In this week's cover story the former first lady and author of new style book The Look, opens up like never before about the intense scrutiny she and her husband Barack Obama faced while he was in office — and how it was par for the course as the first Black family in the White House.
Asked how she coped with the high level of criticism about her appearance back then, she tells PEOPLE, "I took it for what it was, pure hypocrisy." In the book she details the time when she was railed against in the media for wearing sleeveless dresses to events as first lady.
MANDEL NGAN/AFP via Getty
Michelle Obama in 2009.
The dual standard, she says, was obvious. "I could pull up pictures of Jackie O in a second and see this fashion icon in sleeveless dresses as First Lady. So at a point you're like, 'Oh, this is politics.'"
She continues, "'If you can't beat them, make everybody scared of them.' That was the motto. If it wasn't the clothes, it was 'that terrorist fist bump.' It was every word that we said. It was my husband's tan suit."
Alex Wong/Getty
Barack Obama in 2014.
The former first lady reveals she had a hand in helping pick the infamous tan suit that was deemed "unpresidential" when the former President wore it while on official business back in 2014.
"I loved that tan suit! When he had it on, I was like, 'Oh my God, you look so cute'," she says. "[Then] I was like, 'Oh, you got clocked for that one. Welcome to my world.' That was toward the end of his presidency, so we were used to all the crazy issues that people would take with us."
And she says she knows what their critics intended to do.
Olivier Douliery-Pool/Getty
Michelle Obama in 2010.
"How often were we called unpresidential? How many ways were our opponents trying to make the country feel that we were not suitable for this job, even when we had it?" she says.
"So I took it as political gamesmanship...We can look at the differences in what's now acceptable in presidents and presidential families. The roles have completely changed. Showing your arms doesn't seem to be much of a big deal, or nothing is a very big deal."
Erik Carter
Michelle Obama covers the Nov. 10, 2025, issue of PEOPLE.
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Her response to it all was to just keep going. "I knew very early on that that was nonsense. So I just kept doing what I thought suited me."
She adds, "That's the thing that you learn as you get older, There are going to be people who love you, people who hate you. There are going to be people who love this book, just like they love all my books. And there are going to be some people who say, 'How dare she talk about fashion? How dare she say anything?' That's just a part of it. It's where we are in our country. It's where we are in our politics, so we move forward."
on People
Source: "AOL Entertainment"
Source: Entertainment
Published: October 31, 2025 at 06:45PM on Source: GL MAG
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