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Shallow Nation

August 5th, 2008 at 1:20 pm

Photos: Tyra Banks as Michelle Obama, Harper’s Bazaar Magazine September 2008

Tyra Banks as Michelle Obama, Harper's Bazaar Magazine, September 2008

Tyra Banks on the cover of Harper's Bazaar Magazine, September 2008

Tyra Banks is featured on the cover of Harper’s Bazaar Magazine September 2008 issue and in a photo shoot in which she pays homage to aspiring First Lady Michelle Obama. Tyra Banks is profiled in an accompanying article.

When it came to paying homage to Michelle Obama for this story, Banks found the process “surreal.” “It’s kind of embarrassing,” she confesses, “but in my early 20s, I used to want to be a princess. But I didn’t want to have to marry somebody in order to do it! Of course, I don’t see the position of first lady as a princess, where it’s something you have to marry into. With Barack Obama, his becoming president is them becoming president because Michelle was there from the beginning. Without Michelle, he wouldn’t be there.” Or, as she pronounces to her Tyra Banks Show camera after her Oval Office portrait, “Michelle Obama, you’re one hot mama.”

Tyra Banks as Michelle Obama, Harper's Bazaar Magazine, September 2008

A number of presidential candidates have appeared on Banks’s talk show (Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, John Edwards), and she’s after Michelle Obama to appear this fall. She has met her before, noting she was “so warm and so gracious. She’s got that direct-eye-contact, truly-connecting thing. She’s not a ‘ha, ha, ha’ type.” She smiles and continues, “And I love that she’s tall.”

Tyra Banks as Michelle Obama, Harper's Bazaar Magazine, September 2008

“Being first lady is not just about being the wife but really taking command and having true vision,” Banks adds, noting the infinitely tricky terrain of being a woman in politics. “Hillary Clinton was on my show in January, and I asked her, ‘Do you ever just get terrified to say anything? Because everything is so scrutinized and picked apart and dissected?’ And she said, ‘Honestly, Tyra, yes!’ And it’s the same for Michelle Obama, especially with her and Barack being the first, you know, in so, so many ways.”

Tyra Banks as Michelle Obama, Harper's Bazaar Magazine, September 2008

Banks, 34, in her own way, is a “first” too. Over her 19-year career, in front of both the fashion lens and the television camera, she has variously been anointed a supermodel, a “hero and pioneer,” and, of course, “the new Oprah.” (The New York Times Magazine also recently threw in a comparison to Martha Stewart.) And while she will joke that she got here — the host and executive producer of both America’s Next Top Model and the Emmy-winning The Tyra Banks Show, about to enter its fourth season, and one of Time magazine’s “People Who Shape Our World” — by being, yes, fierce, what’s cool about Banks, who now earns an estimated $23 million a year, is that she was never too cool to be commercial. By doing so, she hasn’t just broken borders — of ethnicity, of cynicism, of fashion cliché — she has broken ground.

Source: Harper’s Bazaar - Tyra Banks, Michelle Obama, First Lady, September Fashion

Photo credit: Alexi Lubomirski/Harper’s Bazaar

Tyra Banks as Michelle Obama, Harper's Bazaar Magazine, September 2008