First Lady Michelle Obama wears her signature cardigan while dancing with performers from the television show So You Can Dance during the annual White House Easter Egg Roll on April 6, 2015.
Mark Wilson/Getty Images
Ah, the cardigan: your granny’s cozy go-to used to be available year-round, but in limited quantities and colors. It was considered the sartorial equivalent of flossing: necessary, but not glamorous.
“The cardigan used to be something to keep you warm in the work place,” explains Teri Agins, who covered the fashion industry for the Wall Street Journal for years. “It was not really an accessory you left on—unless you wore it as part of a twin set.”
That look, sweater upon sweater, was considered too prim for a lot of young women. It was their mother’s look.
Enter Michelle Obama, and the game changed.
“She wore cardigans with her sleeveless dresses, wore a lot of print dresses with solid cardigans,” Agins says. She even sometimes belted her sweaters to show off her trim waistline.
And she didn’t just wear the sweaters behind closed doors at 1600 Pennsylvania. For a March 2009 Vogue interview about her new job, she wore a papaya cashmere cardigan with a soft ruffled blouse. When the Obamas made their first official trip to England, she donned a jeweled cream silk cardigan over a pale green pencil skirt when she visited 10 Downing Street. The London-based international press noticed. IDTV described the effect this way: “Her upbeat ensemble stood out alongside the British Prime Minister’s wife’s navy outfit.”
That sweater, from mid-market retailer J. Crew, sold out within hours the same day photos of Mrs. O were released. The total cost of the sweater and skirt (also J. Crew) was $400.
Kim Kardashian’s every outfit may be chronicled by photographers, too, but you don’t see sales of her cut-down-to-there dresses or super-shredded jeans selling out after those photos are published. Kardashian is a celebrity, but she does not move markets in the same way. Most celebrities don’t.
Michelle Obama does, and it’s often her more casual clothes that cause bottom lines and stocks to soar. There are even numbers that prove it: David Yermack, a professor of finance at NYU’s Stern School of Business actually tracked Mrs. O’s looks for about a year in a study that was published in the Harvard Business Review. How This First Lady Moves Markets looked at 189 outfits Mrs. O wore to public events from November 2008 through December 2009 and eyeballed 30 publicly traded stocks from the businesses whose brands the first lady wore. Yermack says the findings surprised even him:
“It was truly remarkable how much more effect Mrs. Obama had on the commercial fashion industry that almost any other celebrity you could find in any other commercial setting,” Yermack says. And it wasn’t just a freak blip on the graph: “This would be a very permanent thing,” Yermack emphasized. “The stocks would not go down the next day. So to put a number on it for just a generic company at a routine event, it was worth about $38 million to have Mrs. Obama wear your clothes.”
Source: NPR | KAREN GRIGSBY BATES
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