Michelle Obama, 62, Recreates Outfit She Wore as a Teenager at Princeton
The former first lady gave her Ivy League style an update.
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Michelle Obama, 62, appeared on the Call Her Daddy podcast on Wednesday wearing a contemporary take on one of her Princeton-era outfits.
The former first lady showed up to the podcast taping in a red sweater vest pinned over a striped, collared shirt and jeans.
“It’s a redo,” she told host Alex Cooper. “It’s the next version. My campus look, 2.0 or 5.0.″ Her wardrobe, she explained, took inspiration from one of the vintage looks featured in her new coffee table book.
Obama released a fashion retrospective, The Look, with longtime stylist Meredith Koop in November.
“There is a picture [in the book] that a lot of people have been showing of me at Princeton, and Meredith Koop had the idea of updating [it],” Obama, who attended Princeton from 1981 to 1985 and graduated cum laude with a degree in sociology, said.
In the vintage photo, Obama, who started college as a 17-year-old, wore a bright red sweater over a collared shirt, jeans, minimal makeup, and had her braided hair pulled away from her face.
Obama’s half-up, half-down braids offered a 2026 update to the hairstyle she wore in college. For makeup, she picked a similarly simple nude lip color, but added intrigue with a deep smoky eye.
According to Marie Claire, every piece Obama wore for her guest appearance on Call Her Daddy came from French designer Isabel Marant, including the brand’s $720 Aurora striped shirt, $372 Devima vest, and $432 Stely jeans in a dark wash.
Michelle Obama's new book was written in partnership with stylist Meredith Koop.
Crown Publishing Group
While the throwback outfit appears on the first few pages of the book, Obama previously posted it on Instagram in May 2018, during college graduation season.
She captioned the image, “This is me at Princeton in the early 1980s. I know that being a first-generation college student can be scary, because it was scary for me. I was black and from a working-class neighborhood in Chicago, while Princeton’s student body was generally white and well-to-do... But I found close friends and a mentor who gave me the confidence to be myself.” She added a congratulatory message to the Class of 2018 and hashtagged the post #ReachHigher.