I'm trying to imagine myself being called "a new womenswear icon," and thinking to myself, hey ... great.
…the Obama girls are still the first First Daughters whose post-White House lives occupy not only The Daily Mail's endless-scroll webpages but also TikTok and X (née Twitter), where netitzens this week were nihilistically delighted to see photos of Malia Obama looking cool and timeless — …
What makes Malia a "new menswear icon?" I mean other than a desperate attempt on the part of author Eileen Cartter to find a hook to get checkout-lane tabloid fodder onto the pages of GQ, a formerly respected "men's" (whatever that means) fashion and lifestyle magazine?
Allow Cartter to finish her thought.
…which is to say, she was smoking a cigarette and wearing a great pair of pants.
I'm not sure why anyone would be "nihilistically delighted" at a woman wearing pants and smoking. My mother wore pants. And she smoked. "Nihilistic delight" was not the first thing that came to my mind when I saw her. The first thing that came to my mind was, "when's dinner?"
(The second thing that came to my mind was how quickly I was going to have to duck a wooden spoon for asking "when's dinner?")
No matter, according to GQ,
Fall's hottest look is a pair of perfectly pleated pants, a crafty cardigan, and a cigarette.
Let's take these one at a time.
First the pants: Perfectly pleated or not, we have to address the elephant in the room.
Maybe she should have taken up smoking.
Speaking of which, when did smoking become cool again? We've been badgered our entire adult lives to not only refrain from smoking, but to banish anyone who did from public life.
Now it's suddenly okay?
"Obama's daughters smoking cigs is the return of monoculture," posted The New Yorker writer Naomi Fry, "and I for one am into it."
Of course you are.
Because time is a flat circle, we've anecdotally swung back around from the Truth anti-tobacco campaign of the 2000s and young people are taking pleasure in blasting cigs again.
Because a group of 20-something hipster wannabes happened to catch some reruns of Madmen, we have to get all Nietzsche all of a sudden?
Where are all the cultural scolds now?
"Blasting cigs," I would guess, hoping that the kids will think they're cool.
As for the "crafty cardigan?"
Taking a smoke break outside an LA convenience store, Malia wore an earth-toned cropped knit cardigan from the Australian brand Kina & Tam (whose website describes its overall design philosophy as "dopamine dressing"), lug-soled black boots, and high-waisted pleated wool slacks.
Good news for all you Mr. Roger's Neighborhood fans?
Sorry, not so much.
We're talking about a whole different kind of neighborhood, less "Daniel Striped Tiger" and more "dopamine dressing," which I guess means, well, whatever this is.
I'm not getting "menswear icon" from this. I'm getting a "gender-confused body positive Nightmare on Elm Street."
The rest of the piece makes almost no attempt to make the connection the headline promises beyond asserting that her outfits are "menswear-y" but rather reads like the vacant, fashion-obsessed, breathless tabloid fair that it is.
There was the combo of jaunty cinch-back canvas khaki pants, gray zip-up hoodie, and Mars Yards she wore on a Los Angeles stroll early last year. A pair of green, raw-hemmed Assembly work pants and Y-Project hiking boots for a night out at Soho House. Slouchy knee-length denim shorts and Patta x New Balance 990s on a Whole Foods run over the summer... Wearing her waist-length braids loose down her back, Malia supplemented the look with two very contemporary objets de curiosités: a cigarette and a jumbo-sized insulated Hydro Flask water bottle.
I do not make a habit of following the tabloids, so I did not appreciate the Malia and Sasha industrial complex that has popped up around them.
I would ridicule people who are obsessed with such pointless nonsense more, but I've watched Iron Man 20 times - well, 21 times including today - so… yeah.
From the time Barack Obama captured the fancy of guilt-ridden progressives desperate for absolution, there has been this at-times comical, over-the-top attempt to make them more than they are. Barack is not a gifted orator. He's adept at reading off a teleprompter. Michele is not a supermodel. She's perfectly average, just like the rest of us.
And Malia is not a menswear icon. She's not an icon of any kind. She's just another insecure kid trying to fit in.
Pointing that out is not racist.
Refusing to, is.
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