Michelle Obama's Royally Inappropriate Outfit Will Always Haunt Her

Cast your mind to April 2009. The newly minted Obamas have been in the White House barely three months when they find themselves ushered into a gilt-trimmed salon of Buckingham Palace. Still seemingly riding the afterglow of inauguration season, Barack Obama smiles beside Queen Elizabeth, who is donning a pale pink suit in her usual silhouette. The glimmer from the gilded cornices dances across the room, whilst china vases crowd the mantelpiece in porcelain silence. The scene is seamless. That is, until Michelle breaks the spell.

At six feet tall, she arrived with an automatic gravitas. But instead of sporting a stunning outfit that proves politicians can be fashion icons, too, she stood beside the queen in an almost ascetic pairing. A white shell top with a high scoop neck was layered under a plain, fitted black cardigan, left casually unfastened. Her black A-line skirt was as plain as a school uniform. In any other setting, this ensemble might have read as clean and efficient. But here — in a room dripping with ceremonial history and the weight of their first meeting with the royal family — it felt jarringly monastic and inappropriately at ease.

Michelle Obama's style rarely misfires. In the years since leaving the White House, Obama's style evolution has been a pleasure to watch. Many of the former first lady's biggest fashion risks of all time have succeeded precisely because they marry ambition with her cool elegance and shrewd judgement. Perhaps this is why the memory of this miscalculation still startles so much, even years later. We know the royal family have sported outfits that were beyond controversial themselves. But we can't help but wonder what possessed Michelle to opt for a choice so pared back it felt off-duty in one of the most on-duty settings in the world.

Michelle Obama's outfit wasn't the only disruption to the palace's clockwork that day. During the Buckingham Palace visit, she did something few ever dare: she reached out and set a hand on the Queen's shoulder. This is simply not done — certainly not in Buckingham Palace, where the Lord Chamberlain's Office keeps centuries of state visit etiquette running via curtsies and handshakes. So, we can imagine the sight of a first lady's hand resting on the queen's shoulder might have had them reaching for the smelling salts.

But, in what is perhaps most surprising about the whole interaction, the Queen didn't recoil. In fact, she actually closed the distance, and slipped an arm around Michelle's waist. In her memoir, "Becoming" (which ranks, incidentally, one of the celebrity memoirs you'll want to listen to on audiobook, no less), Michelle would later write that the bold diplomatic gesture was born from sore feet. The queen, glancing down at Michelle's black Jimmy Choos, remarked dryly on their discomfort, before gesturing to her own pumps with a flicker of commiseration. Michelle confessed she was suffering, too. "We were just two tired ladies oppressed by our shoes," she wrote. And then, as the former first lady tells it, the queen "busted out with a fully charming laugh." By royal standards, surely this was as disarming as they come.