Jill Biden Praised for ‘Recycling’ Previously Worn Outfits at the Olympics: ‘Reflects the Climate-Focused Aspect of the Biden Agenda’
Photo by JONATHAN NACKSTRAND/AFP via Getty Images.
First Lady Dr. Jill Biden’s trip to the Tokyo Olympics has earned some positive public relations so far, with Team USA athletes chanting her name and the fashion director for the New York Times fawning over her for basically wearing her own clothes.
On Monday, Vanessa Friedman’s column titled “Jill Biden, Changing the Fashion Game” praised the first lady for not just representing American designers with her sartorial choices, but also for “reflect[ing] the climate-focused aspect” of her husband President Joe Biden’s agenda:
During her four days abroad, she not only represented the American industry, wearing a roll call of local designers. She also, perhaps more important, embodied the theme of the Olympics, which was billed as the greenest Games yet with the motto “Be better, together — For the planet and the people.” Dr. Biden apparently wore only a single new garment during the entirety of her trip to Japan: the Ralph Lauren navy jacket and pants that were part of the official U.S. Olympic Team uniform, and that she wore in her role as official U.S. Olympic Team booster.
Other than that, her clothes were all recycled outfits from her closet. And not just at fun family getaways: At public events. Often very big, photo op-filled, recorded-for-history public events.
As Friedman noted, Biden’s only new outfit was the Ralph Lauren ensemble pulled from Team USA’s uniforms (pictured above), and everything else she wore had been previously photographed.
Biden’s “recycled wardrobe,” wrote Friedman, was helping to combat “the culture of disposability around fashion” in a way she believed would “now be a defining element” of the first lady’s tenure and “part of the way she takes the role forward.”
It is probably not very shocking that Friedman had no such concern for “disposable fashion” when she waxed poetic about the fashion industry’s “eight year obsession” with former First Lady Michelle Obama and how “her wardrobe was representative of the country her husband wanted to lead.”
Obama, of course, was lauded for her “sartorial diplomacy” when she wore fashions created by designers from the countries where she was visiting, while Friedman was far more dismissive of former First Lady Melania Trump’s penchant for European luxury labels, “inaccessible” and “celluloid” glamour, and “let-them-eat-cake” moments.
