After saying good-bye to the White House and publishing her first memoir, former First Lady Michelle Obama embarked on a very stylish book tour.
For her last stop of 2018, Obama sat down for a one-on-one interview with one of New York City’s most fashionable ambassadors, Sarah Jessica Parker, at the Barclays Center in Brooklyn on Wednesday night. She did not wear Parker’s own line of footwear, instead opting for glittery, thigh-high, $4,000 Balenciaga boots, plus a bright yellow wrap dress from the spring 2019 collection, which showed in Paris this September and is not yet in stores.
Wait. Those Balenciagas? The ones that look like socks?
Well, yes — if we’re talking about thigh-high socks. Balenciaga designer Demna Gvasalia has made these boots — which look like a hybrid between tights, leggings, and heeled boots — his signature since he took over the brand in 2016. But Obama’s pair are perhaps his shiniest yet. They make her look like a bionic woman, or a more fashionable version of the human fish from The Shape of Water. Or like Ariana Grande in the “God Is a Woman” video, except instead of swimming around in a vat of paint, Obama bathed a vat of silver glitter. In other words, they’re hard to describe in words.
“I did know that my clothes were making a statement, I knew that was the case,” Obama told Parker of her fashion choices during her time as First Lady. “So we decided why don’t we use this platform to uplift some young new designers who normally wouldn’t get this kind of attention, because you can change their lives, which is one of the reasons why we chose Jason Wu for my inaugural gown.”
Demna Gvasalia and Balenciaga are two names that probably don’t need any more uplifting right now. But personally, we feel uplifted by the sight of these incredible boots.
