Robin Givhan

That one designer, you know, was speaking his mind.

But certainly there are others that are, you know, based in Europe for sure that are happy to dress the First Lady and the family.

Well, you know, I think one of the reasons that fashion gets under people's skin, so to speak, is because it really does get at the core of how we want the world to see us and how the world wants us to be seen.

And often those two things can be terribly in conflict.

I mean, I think about, you know, the...

incredible amounts of attention and hysteria over drag queens.

And I mean, it comes down to the fact that, you know, people wanting to control how others move through, identify themselves, move through the culture, move through society.

And, you know, it's, it's

It leaves me basically speechless in many ways.

But, I mean, I do think that the industry is at its best when it is being incredibly... When it's being artful and using...

the creativity that designers have to tell us a story, to allow us to see beauty where we didn't necessarily know we would find it, or to highlight something that perhaps we see all the time, but never gave it really a second glance.

And I think fashion can be really

powerful when it challenges our ideas about gender roles and who holds the power and what power looks like in a particular circumstance.

Well, you know,

I think when you look at the pictures of people with political clout in the United States, that wall is overwhelmingly dominated by men and by white men, and they're all wearing suits.

And if nothing else, those images have sort of taught us that the white guy in the room wearing the suit is probably the one in charge.

And that has really taught us, given us this sort of baseline idea of what power looks like.

And we are obviously in a very visual culture.

And I think what is challenging or has been challenging for women is that there wasn't a template, right?

The most...