Obama as America’s model president
By: Noemie Emery, Examiner Columnist
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January 14, 2009
In 1993, when he was still editing the New Republic, Andrew Sullivan made news and history when he posed, wearing a t-shirt, in an ad for The Gap.
As the New York Times Magazine enthused later, ‘It’s great to live in a time when...a serious journalist...can appear as a model without undermining his credibility as a professional,’ while Walter Kirn wrote in the Times that the sight of the editor of a leading political journal lending the gravitas of his calling to selling a line of mid-level sportswear might be seen by some people as ‘odd.’
Odd or not, it was a moment of import, so that it was no surprise 15 years later when Sullivan and the current editors of the New Republic emerged as the most intense and fervent proponents of the first president to look like a model himself.
Of course, Obama never posed for a photo shoot, but this hardly mattered. Every picture he took looked just like a layout, evoking the Good Life as lived by the trendy and slender.
He didn’t look much, as he said, like the gods on Mount Rushmore, but he certainly looked like the new gods of style. Open the papers, open the magazines, open the catalogues; and there he or his stand-ins were likely to be.
Do not think that the fashion world didn’t sense this, and claim him as one of its own. As a blog called Hot Couture Fashion claimed in July, “Barack Obama...is now being treated as a new fashion icon,” sold as an item at stores round the world.
Anna Wintour held a fundraising fashion show for his benefit. Diane von Furstenburg designed a tote in his honor. He was endorsed by male models at Major Models, according to a blog known as Beautyconfessional.
He was “all the rage” during fashion week in Milan, where Donatella Versace dedicated her Spring-Summer collection to him, and called him “the man of the moment,” a “relaxed man who doesn’t need to flex muscles” to show he was strong.
His fame spread to the Balkans, where, as ABC noted, a Belgrade-based designer of gloves dedicated her 2009 menswear collection to the Democrats’ candidate, while in Bosnia and Croatia, “a line of single-breasted suits named ‘Borac Obama’ are flying off the rails.”
“We were struggling for a while to find something new but now Obama is a new inspiration,’ said one store manager. ‘He can carry the suit well and he has such a positive smile....He also wants to change everything, and fashion is all about change.”
Ronald Reagan was a film star, and John Kennedy looked like one, but neither of them was ever endorsed by male models, and their only contribution to male couture was a negative one, as when Kennedy killed off the hat industry all by himself.
But there is a difference between a model and film star (very few models have made it in acting) as the actor creates a discrete human being, while the model creates an ambience surrounding a product, into which a consumer can buy.
The Obama ambience - urbane, hip, and facile - is that of the Gap, the Times, and the New Republic, which connect through links like Obama and Sullivan; the magazine’s younger editors, who, Kirn said, were Obama-like wannabes - verbal, “cocksure” and highly precocious - and even most of the magazine’s readers, who seem like Obama and Sullivan clones.
(“The typical reader,” Kirn wrote in 1993, “is an extensively educated man in his mid-40s who makes around $100,000 a year, has a valid passport, and owns a VCR.” The VCR was then the height of technology, but otherwise the description rings true.)
As the Times Magazine said a week or so later, “The New Republic is to the world of political ideas what the Gap is to clothes: a retailer of fashions that stays close to the mainstream, while struggling mightily to appear cutting edge.”
Kirn himself quoted media critic Jack Shafer as saying “It’s a lifestyle publication for the mind.”
If the mind can express itself as a lifestyle, can the lifestyle act as the form of the mind? When readers and editors look at Obama, they see themselves, only better, and even more fabulous.
But can the model’s president become a model for presidents? Will he impress Putin as he did Donatella Versace? Will lifestyle politics disarm the Iranians? The Editor as Gap Model was just the beginning. The President as Gap Model comes next in succession, and it comes to a country near you.
Examiner columnist Noemie Emery is contributing editor of The Weekly Standard and author of “Great Expectations: The Troubled Lives of Political Families.”
