Everybody Is Talking About Michelle Obama's Boots

Perhaps pundits heard Melania Trump's call to ignore her fashion choices because they're now focused on an outfit her predecessor wore Wednesday. In the last stop on her Becoming book tour, Michelle Obama walked on stage at Brooklyn's Barclays Center wearing a shimmery yellow shirt dress and a $3,900 pair of gold sequinned thigh-high boots, both by Balenciaga. As first lady, Obama knew her clothes were "dissected," but "now, I'm free to do whatever," Obama said in a discussion with actress and fashion icon Sarah Jessica Parker, per Vox and the Miami Herald. "They were just really cute. I was like, 'Those some nice boots!'" Pundits had much more to say.

• "It wasn't just an eye-catching ensemble. It was fashion. Fashion. Faaaashion!" writes Robin Givhan at the Washington Post, arguing the choice was appropriate since "Obama's book tour is the equivalent of a literary rock concert."
• "If anyone on this earth can pull off thigh-high, iridescent, gold sequin boots, it's Michelle Obama," writes Laura Byager at Mashable. "It takes a lot to upstage SJP's shoe game, but Obama did it," she adds.
• She "truly turned things up to 11"—and must've known what a statement she was making, Gemma Cartwright writes at PopSugar, noting Obama’s stylist, Meredith Koop, posted the look on Instagram with the caption "too much?"
• It definitely was too much for Jeannie DeAngelis at the conservative American Thinker. Obama "dressed like a stand-in for Big Bird" yet "the biased media viewed the embarrassing spectacle Michelle made of herself as a fashion dream come true," she writes, accusing Obama of a "disingenuous concern for the poor."
• At People, however, Kaitlyn Frey says Obama "seemed to be channeling Beyoncé in the head-turning ensemble" that made for a "mic-drop fashion moment." She also rounds up Twitter reactions like this one: "When I die, please project these blessed images of Michelle Obama's boots on my tombstone."

(More Michelle Obama stories.)