Former First Lady Michelle Obama is out on a glossy new publicity run for her coffee-table book The Look, a 304-page collection of photos and commentary about her fashion choices, scheduled for release on November 4, 2025. She’s used interviews on the media circuit to frame the project as a corrective to the scrutiny she says she endured in the White House and to talk openly about choices like braids that she now calls liberating.
Conservative commentator Megyn Kelly didn’t mince words in response, calling the project perplexing and pointing out the obvious contradiction: complain about fame and being stared at, then launch a high-profile book tour and podcast. Kelly’s blunt pushback — mocking the notion that a multimillion-dollar media platform equals victimhood — landed with a lot of Americans who are tired of elites profiting from grievance.
Let’s be clear: this is not about fashion. It’s about a culture in which privilege migrates to a new kind of currency — celebrity complaint. Michelle Obama can now sell a pricey $50 hardcover and parlay her name into whatever platform she likes, while presenting herself as a persecuted figure deserving of our sympathy. That hypocrisy is what fuels conservative anger, and it’s exactly what Kelly highlighted.
Obama’s comments about hair and how Black women once felt they had to straighten their hair to avoid controversy are important topics that deserve serious discussion, but they are also being packaged and monetized in the same breath as an illustrated fashion book. Real conversations about discrimination are being squeezed into celebrity branding exercises, and the optics of a multimillionaire telling everyday Americans about hardship rings hollow to anyone who works a real job and pays taxes.
Megyn Kelly’s critique — that the substance of the project feels thin while the spectacle is loud — taps into a broader conservative frustration with elites who want to lecture the country about humility while living at the top of every institution. When public figures reduce complex social issues to curated aesthetics and feel-good slogans, they rob those causes of seriousness and turn them into another revenue stream.
Americans who prize hard work and personal responsibility don’t need another lesson in performative victimhood sold back to us at a luxury price. If Michelle Obama wants to use her platform to advance honest discussion about race, standards, and cultural expectations, do it without the fanfare and the lecture tour — or at least stop pretending it isn’t profitable. The real story here is less about what she wore and more about a ruling class that now profits by presenting itself as oppressed.
