Michelle Obama on the 2013 Vogue Cover: Eros and Control
Photo:
AP / Vogue / Annie Leibovitz
During Susan Sontag's lifetime, the bon mot was circulating in New York that she was a beautiful woman, but always looked as if she was renovating her apartment and was only out for a moment to fetch another bucket of paint.
That was the seventies and eighties.
Glamor was camp, and camp was glamor.
There was humor too.
A tall, breathtakingly clever woman, of a strict and wide mind, could wear flabby trousers and an anti-hairstyle.
And thus be an icon, a human being with sex, intellect and reflected feeling.
With political commitment.
That was a long time ago.
Perhaps Hillary Clinton herself regretted being styled as a kind of happiness marie on her "Vogue" cover as the president's wife in 1998 - a lovely smile in the blond young girl's face, chaste in a long black velvet dress on a dark red sofa, a lush bouquet of roses as a stylish companion.
In any case, the message was clear: you need not be afraid, dear fellow citizens, that I will make use of my head.
Or even wants to influence.
I am tamed.
The embassy neither worked nor worked, but Clinton had made an effort.
Icon: enlarge
A kind of Glücks Mariechen: Hilary Clinton as first lady on the cover of »Vogue«
And who knows why Michelle Obama - no less smart, educated and ambitious than Clinton - posed on her three covers for Vogue more than a decade later, as a woman who was mainly manicure, trained upper arms and grandiose robes Remember?
Perhaps the first black flotus should symbolize both at the same time - eros and control, hedonism and discipline.
Flowers, upholstered furniture, western bourgeois wealth: Michelle Obama on the April 2013 cover
Photo:
AP / Vogue / Annie Leibovitz
In both cases, with Obama and Clinton, everyone involved opted for a styling that carefully avoided any individuality.
No clue as to what was important to these women and no insignia of power.
Not even a book in sight, instead: flowers, upholstered furniture, western bourgeois wealth.
Anonymous glamor.
The portraits were supposed to be iconic and impersonal at the same time, and so they have become a bourgeois, lacerated cramp.
The woman at the height of her life: a smiling styling product, without origin and without traces.
A pleasing effort result.
A falcon in the luxury aviary.
So now Kamala Harris has met Vogue fate.
Not as President's
wife
, but as Vice President-
elect
.
As the first woman in this position, a non-white one too.
There are two covers of her for the current issue (one for the magazine, one online) and they are - rightly - criticized for being extremely pathetic, especially on social media.
Not "respectful" is a major accusation that the editorial team should have made more effort.
They are not glamorous enough.
Icon: enlarge
Kamala Harris on the cover: a well-groomed brand ambassador
Photo:
Vogue
Yes, they are really not glamorous.
The Vice President of the USA is on the magazine cover like the head of a furniture store who says to her customers: If you order your curtains from me, you will make no mistake.
We only carry quality.
On the online presence of »Vogue« we encounter a well-groomed brand ambassador for wellness products;
this whole wasteland in light blue (blazer), caramel and beige (curtains in the background) would be ideal for an upscale drugstore magazine.
But is that really the problem?
That, as they say, there is no such thing as a “wow gig”?
Perhaps it is a step forward that the editors of this iconic style magazine couldn't think of anything more about this powerful, charismatic, non-white woman other than a pastel frame.
The contradictions in society are so developed that they result in a kind of creative rigidity.
Style, power and femininity, work and politics that want to act fairly democratically, without pomp and arrogance - there is obviously no convincing picture for all of this.
You can be angry about that.
Or relieved.
It is the aesthetic proof of adequate perplexity.
Icon: The mirror
