First lady Michelle Obama speaks to high school students at Mary’s Center, a community health center in the Adams Morgan neighborhood of Washington February 10, 2009. (For more pictures of the visit, click here.)
Michelle Obama will be the second First Lady to be on the cover of Vogue Magazine!
Enjoy WashPo’s breathtaking description of the photos. (Because I don’t have a copy of them yet!)
In the cover photo, taken by Annie Leibovitz, Obama is leaning on a soft beige sofa at the Hay-Adams Hotel, where the first family stayed days before the historic inauguration. Obama is wearing a magenta dress by Jason Wu, who designed her inaugural ball gown. Her right hand rests under her chin. Her left hand folded beneath her. She is wearing a diamond that you do not often see her wearing in recent appearances. Behind her, light streams in between curtains.
Inside, a photograph shows her in a black dress by designer Narciso Rodriguez. She is standing in front of open French doors. Outside is Lafayette Park and in the distance you can barely see the White House, the seat of power. Behind her are the props of her profession: a laptop, a cup of coffee or more likely tea. A notepad, a pen. A folded newspaper. She is tethered to work by an old-fashioned telephone, the spiral cord stretched, the receiver at her right ear. She is not talking. She is either listening or on hold.
She will be March’s “cover girl” with her own eight-page spread. Michelle follows Hillary Clinton who was the first First Lady to ever make the front. Leibovitz has photographed Mrs. O before for Vogue and Paris Match magazines.
Feel free to debate how you feel about the infamous and celebrated fashion photog and her … um … interesting history of photographing famous black people. (I still have nightmares about Whoopi in that bathtub of milk.)
That said, this is not only a big deal for a First Lady, but a pretty big to-do for anyone with a permanent tan who’s ever wanted to be on the cover of America’s fashion Bible. The paucity of black women, scratch that, any women who aren’t white, on the cover of Vogue is of legend. (Um … Naomi? Oprah? Anyone else? I think you can count them all on one hand.) This is bound to be a much talked about, coveted and “covered” cover.
Live Your Best Life. 
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