Anonymous wrote:
She just needs a professional stylist. That’s all. That she resists hiring one troubles me.
Her stylist is a professional (working) stylist at this point. But she has horrible taste and gives bad advice.
I think Michelle is avoiding skillful fashion stylist because she still wants to feel superior. Big mistake.
“I met Meredith when she was a young sales associate about a decade ago, and ever since, I’ve been blessed to have her by my side,” Mrs. Obama wrote in an email. “Together, we’ve prepared for every sort of event — from afternoons in T-shirts and gloves in a garden with middle schoolers to evenings in formal ball gowns with heads of state. Over the years, I’ve come to depend on Meredith for far more than wardrobe. She’s ridden with us through eight hectic years. She’s been a friend and mentor to our daughters. And she’s given us all a sense of comfort and home, no matter where in the world we might be.”
Ms. Koop did not set out to be a stylist. Growing up in St. Louis, she wanted to be a dancer. She went to Vanderbilt University and ended up living with her older sister in Chicago. One day she saw an ad in a paper for a sales associate at a clothing boutique and decided to apply.
The boutique was Ikram, a Chicago store run by the charismatic Ikram Goldman, a retailer with an uncanny ability to match clothing and clients and deep personal relationships with the women whom she dresses. (Her fans include Mellody Hobson, the high-profile Chicago asset manager and philanthropist, and Desirée Rogers, the former White House social secretary and Johnson Publishing executive.) Ms. Koop spent some five years there, “exposed to so many different types of women, women that are out there in the world doing something.”
“It was extraordinary training,” she said, “although I did not realize it at the time.” One of those women was Michelle Obama.
She started as a general aide, and in 2010, after Ms. Goldman stepped away from her unofficial White House role to focus on her store, Ms. Koop became the first lady’s de facto stylist in the Ikram mode: exploring “the patchwork of America.” Which is when she learned what it really involved. Which is pretty much what all dressing involves, only with much higher stakes.
Mrs. Obama had the final O.K. but didn’t question her beforehand. “She just frickin’ believed in me,” Ms. Koop said. She didn’t want to say more, she said, because she “would cry.”
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.nytimes.com/2018/11/15/fashion/michelle-obama-stylist-meredith-koop.amp.html%3f0p19G=7900
I think this woman is a personal friend of Michelle. That’s lovely, I am positive Mrs. Obama is a loyal and caring friend. However. She needs a non-friend who will tell her no on some of these disasters. Yellow dress and thigh high glitter boots as a prime example!