For her last appearance on “Oprah” Michelle Obama, accompanied by her husband, wore a sleeveless, printed, patchwork-style, silk, georgette dress by London-based designer Duro Olowu.  The dress seemed to embody all the divergent indentities we associate with Michelle and expect her to effortlessly embody.  It was: dressy, relaxed, sassy, traditional, ethnic, afro-centric, chic, bold, and crafty.

Olowu has a knack for making clothing that are bright and beautiful but also incredibly street-wise.  Dries van Noten was doing this for a while, but then retreated back into severe tones and slumpy profiles.  And Xuly Bet does something like this too, but his pieces lack a sense of polish.  Olowu does separates and men’s clothes too but it’s his dresses that are really outstanding.  They’re like very modern kimonos, lavish, lyrical, and rigorously structured, but for an entirely liberated figure.

Charleston is a sunny city, full of pretty old buildings and overrun with gaggles of Citadel cadets, gentleman lawyers, and ladies out for a night out on the town.  The main park, Marion Square, is a wide-open field graced with trim palmettos and magnolia trees heavy with bud.  Off to one side there’s a large, modern sculpture, a memorial to Holocaust victims who lost their lives in Europe during World War II.

Over on Chalmers Street there’s another, especially pertinent Charleston memorial, the Old Slave Mart Museum.  Inside this unremarkable, two-story stone building slaves were held after purchase from traders and owners and then auctioned to local buyers.  Displays describe how some slaves resisted, influenced prospective buyers, communicated with one another, and worked to keep their families together.  Like the city’s buildings, which have all settled crookedly due to the watery subsoil, the museum gets at something deeper and more troublesome than what’s on the surface.

Driving south through the Carolinas in May, long, monotonous stretches of highway were enlivened by fields of wildflowers along the sides and in the medians.  They seemed to be the perfect, natural expression of springtime optimism.  In reality there’s nothing wild about the wildflowers.  The beds are overseen by the states’ wildflower agencies, of which the North Carolina DOT Wildflower Program seems to be the most accomplished.

These plantings owe much to the work of Lady Bird Johnson.  She was instrumental in passing the Johnson administration’s 1965 Highway Beautification Act, which governed the development of roadsides, and, long after she had left public life, established the Lady Bird Wildflower Center in Austin, Texas.  I’m not sure how her efforts were perceived in the 1960’s, when she began, but I can imagine that they were considered entirely suitable, superficial First Lady hobbies.  The truth is that Lady Bird’s ideas are right in sync with current landscape trends and LEED imperatives, which emphasize native plantings to promote water conservation and soil retention.  The flowers are a powerful, lyrical legacy.

Much fuss has been made about the fascinator Princess Beatrice Duchess of York wore to Prince William’s wedding.  It was not pretty but it was bold.  The Princess is blessed with a stunning red mane that requires no embellishment but, to meet tradition and expectation, she donned an eccentric beige Philip Treacy fascinator crafted from stiffened ribbon that resembled, depending on your frame of mind, a cat hatch, a toilet seat cover, or fallopian tubes.  And she wore it proudly, perfectly upright and low on the forehead.

Philip Treacy is an English milliner of prodigious vision who doesn’t make hats so much as theater.  Fashion, real fashion, involves taking a risk and making oneself the center of attention and, often, making oneself uncomfortable, and that’s exactly what Beatrice did.  (She did it before, too, donning a Treacy butterfly fascinator for cousin Peter Phillips’ wedding in 2008.)  It’s more than you can say about Princess Katherine, who wore a wedding gown that was designed in not-so-subtle imitation of another, more fashionable, princess.