44 First Lady Fashion Looks from Eleanor Roosevelt to Michelle Obama

This weekend Michelle Obama turns another year older and another year more fashionable. See First Lady fashion from the 1930s to today

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President Franklin D. Roosevelt with his wife Eleanor voting in a Hyde Park polling station, 1937.

Michelle Obama probably has a long list of things she’d like to be remembered for—like her initiatives to combat childhood obesity and promote higher education—before she’s remembered for her sense of style. But with great responsibility comes great clothing, and the First Lady will certainly go down as the most fashionable woman in the White House since Jacqueline Kennedy.

Obama is known for choosing the patterned dress over the more subdued pantsuit, for baring her toned arms and—perish the thought—even wearing shorts. And there are some who argue that the choices she makes transcend personal expression and petty analysis and carry a certain amount of cultural significance.

“For some reason in this country there’s this false notion that style and substance have to occupy two separate worlds,” said fashion journalist Kate Betts in an interview with CNN, “and I think she’s proving that that’s wrong.”