Barack'n'Rolling the Show.

The curves perceived through the American first lady’s Maria Pinto dresses are as admirable as the one she has been riding on exponentially since her husband’s first year in office. Indeed, since her husband’s presidency has started, Michelle has not stopped contributing to worthwhile causes, supporting numerous charities and fighting to save the health of the Americans, especially children and women. All this whilst standing by her husband every step of the tumultuous way, and maintaining a stable family home which emanates values of love and respect.

At the International Women’s day dinner at the White House on Monday, Michelle looked stunning in a grey draped dress by Lanvin, and it seems her husband thought the same. As she was introduced to speak, the president was made to stand back...

MRS. OBAMA: Thank you so much. So I get to speak first while he stands and watches. I love this. (Laughter.) Look at me adoringly. (Laughter.)

THE PRESIDENT: I can do that.

MRS. OBAMA: With sincerity. (Laughter.) Anyway...

Such an exchange is typical of the genuine bond which radiates from the first couple, which I think is so endearing given their status. It pleases me to see their affection as normalised, and I think this may well help Americans restore their faith in marriage and even love. It is so great to see that after 8 years of marriage, their love for another appears to be getting stronger, no doubt helped by their common commitment to improve and change American society.

Since Michelle has taken up her role as first lady, both her image and her drive have developed in fascinating ways. She has supported and pushed Obama to focus on many issues from health insurance reform, to climate and energy, to matters of domestic policy and has also made him seek the counsel of other brilliant women, including Ms. Sonia Sotomayor who has just been appointed as Justice to the Supreme Court.

In the last year, Michelle has been responsible for the US’s pursuits for a global health strategy that makes important investments in child and maternal health. She sponsored a U.N. resolution to increase protection for women and girls in conflict-torn countries to help make it possible for more women to reach for their dreams. She was crucial in creating the first Office of Global Women's Issues at the State Department and implemented a scheme that has helped invest $18 million combat the unconscionable cruelties being committed against girls and women in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Next month, she accompanies her husband to host an entrepreneurship summit to help fulfill a commitment he made in Cairo; a summit that will focus, in part, on the challenges facing women entrepreneurs in Muslim communities around the world.

Michelle explains she’s ‘doing all of this not only because promoting women's empowerment is one of the best ways to promote economic development and economic success’ but ‘because it's the right thing to do’. Not only as First lady, but also as a mother of two daughters, a daughter and a grand-daughter, and as a wife, she has every reason to know what she’s talking about. At a time when the imminent change that her husband was promising is being regarded as doubtful by even his most loyal supporters, I find her action orientated optimism insightful.

With flawless style, a compassionate and beautiful smile, and initiatives that display her intellectual and cultural humanism, Michelle embodies all a contemporary woman should seek to be, regardless of her background or indeed, race. Her composure and warmth in the opinion she expresses, combined with the confidence and grace that her demeanour suggest, bring a little security, and feminity, in a world which at times, feels the exact opposite.

I'm Soaking d’Andelot.

It's not often that students get creative, really creative. They shop at Tesco, they buy clothes from Topshop, and when they want a drink, they'll have a beer.

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Not so for Isobel Oliphant, a New York native described by jewellery aficionada Sasha Codinha as 'a beautiful eccentric'. She shops at the greengrocer's, buys her clothes from vintage outlets and when she wants a drink, it's a whisky on the rocks.

Most interestingly of all, the statement making jewellery that she wears is designed by none other than herself.

Oliphant discovered a love for jewellery-making at a young age fiddling around with friendship bracelets which helped cure her 'inability to sit still'. In summer 2008, she interned with Pamela Diem, founder and designer of the brand Little Miss Drama, and quickly learnt the craft of jewellery production. A year later, the girl who instinctively describes herself as 'bizarre' was going round utility stores across the Tri- State area finding materials that could help her make eye-catching pieces.

Oliphant senses 'a void within the jewellery market' which she aims to fill with 'the brute physicality of heavy chain' contrasted with 'the traditional idea of jewellery as decoration'. One might describe her jewellery as a neat dichotomy between functional and beautiful. This concept is grasped by her favourite necklace, 'Ambulance Chaser', which combines industrial chain with Swarovski crystals and freshwater pearls. Each piece is handmade by Isobel and treated with the highest marine quality spar-varnish to protect the metals used, ensuring the product remains intact and safe to wear.

The only pre-requisite that the designer encourages to become a customer is a sense of humour. Oliphant imagines the d'Andelot woman as one who likes to take risks and isn't afraid of standing out for her stylish originality. Oliphant adds that an appreciation for attention and detail is essential in order to value the unique highlights of each adornment.

The designer insists that she doesn't sketch, but rather lets a mental image build in her mind which she instantly transposes to her tools in her New York studio, allowing her idea to blossom in tune with the inspiration. Once she has made the piece in question, she looks at it, she touches it, and whatever name comes to mind is assigned to her design. She calls the process 'creative rather than logical'. It has given rise to astounding names such as 'It's Impolite to Stare' and 'I dropped Math in High School'.

The result is spectacular. Oliphant manages to produce'heavy' yet feminine accessories such as 'Like Butter', a long necklace which consists of double sided black velvet woven in and out of brass links. Her designs could be worn as alluringly rock-chic over a white t-shirt during the day, or as strikingly sophisticated decorating a fur jacket at night. With her modern take on classic ornaments, Oliphant achieves 'a one of a kind piece admired by women, (and some men), of all ages and circumstance'.

It's no coincidence that 'Dans de l'eau' is French for 'in the water'. Dive in d'Andelot and you'll splash everyone around you.

Blogs: Strutting Down the Catwalks of Fashion:

'Bryan Boy' just two seats away from Anna Wintour at the latest D&G Fashion Show.

When Bryan Boy of http://www.bryanboy.com/, a fashion blogger from the Philippines sat next to Anna Wintour at last season's Dolce and Gabbana show, jaws dropped. Not only was this shocking, and daring, it signalled a very clear message that bloggers too now had their space on the front row. Gone are the days that Vogue was a fashion bible, enter a young generation addicted to the fast pace of publishing, Twitter and Facebook.

2010 is said to be the year for fashion bloggers. It seems designers from all over the world once and for all have decided to invest in the blog as a primary source for launching and maintaining interest in their product. All fashion brands want to involve bloggers as they've realised that no campaign can be done without involving the web. It seems smart of companies to look to bloggers who are almost universally young to appeal to the younger generation itself who are fast becoming the new consumers of brands such as Marc Jacobs and Louis Vuitton. After all, all the creativity that's out there in the world is drawn in from the internet into the fashion world.

So what are the requirements for a good blog? After all, anybody can start a blog and write a post here and there, but not everybody can make 6 million viewers a month. Fashion journalist Suzy Menkes, explains: "A good blog is when someone's got a good opinion, got something to say, and really just wants to put it across. A good blogger can really take all sorts of elements and use them both in words and in pictures and make a strong statement."

It seems that to be a blogger one requires many attributes. Yvan Rodick off facehunter.blogspot.com, described as 'Eye Candy for the Style Hungry', once again explains that 'Being a blogger for me is being a combination of different jobs, its being an editor, a writer, a photographer, a marketing person, a businessman, a sociologist, it's a combination of lots of jobs within one person.' Rodik photographs people with a strong sense of individuality and unique sense of style and confirms the ever increasing rise in blog significance in a video on his blog, 'Every month is getting more crazy, there's always more brands, more media who want to involve bloggers in campaigns."

As far as I'm concerned, I'm tremendously in favour of anything that's new and fresh in fashion, and that's what the blog phenomenon is all about. It will be interesting to see whether cult blogs such as www.mrs-o.org or http://www.thecoveted.com/ shall remain and survive in the years to come, but there's no doubt that they now represent a massive part of the fashion industry. One thing that concerns me is that that some bloggers think, in their innocence, that they are completely independent in what they say. However, Ive done quite a lot of work and tracking into how much intervention there is now and how much bloggers are being fed stories. There's this whole thing called seeding that you sew ideas, sew products, and obviously bloggers are a wonderful way to do that, because often they reach a wide audience, one that's very desirable to a brand that's trying to get itself known.

It seems fashion bloggers from all over the world are having the time of their life. Garance Dore, the French blog superstar says she wouldn't give up her blog for the world and exclaims in a quirky French accent that 'the more interesting my life, the more interesting my blog'. Jeannine from www.the coveted.com says that' it was just something that I could do, I could write about whatever I want, it was just me doing my own thing, I found that to be really liberating.'

So does this mean the end of magazines or fashion columns in newspapers? Menkes says she doesn't 'feel threatened; if we just take the fashion world in general, we notice it's just a generational thing. The older people have never had this visceral excitement about the Internet, as it's never been part of their lives.' However, it does seem that newspapers were lulled into a false sense of security after the first dotcom boom went bust.One can see the obvious advantages that a blog might have compared to traditional media. It's much more flexible, as it can change instantly its content depending on what's going on, something which is impossible for magazines. You can post about anything, from 'here's this cool button I found' to breaking news in the fashion industry. It can be very radical, not as censured, and not as politically correct as traditional media.

With fashion brands it's all about control, they have done so much over the years, sometimes even a hundred years, to build up this whole image of themselves, choosing their pages in the magazines, what they're going to be adjacent to, where they will put up their ads, micro managing it. When a Twitter post comes along saying 'the Louis Vuitton sucked, I hated it', it can go viral with 900,000, even three million people responding to it. This can be terrifying for the brand managers.

As summarized by Menkes, 'the world changed when fashion instead of being a monologue, became a conversation.' Instead of being something which was received, there's now a rapport. People can now make comments on shows instantly, or you can even go into a shop, snap yourself on your phone wearing something, send it to your boyfriend and say, 'hey, do you like this?'

Fashion communication is now integrated, backwards and forwards and that's never going to stop, now that it's started, that's it forever. http://www.moveoverwintour.com/.