BILLY NORWICH: First Lady Michelle Obama recently agreed to lend the lemongrass-colored coat and dress she wore on Inauguration Day to your coming retrospective “Isabel Toledo: Fashion From the Inside Out,” commenting when the announcement was made that she “absolutely adored my Inauguration Day ensemble.” Now some people are going to think you at FIT decided to put on an Isabel Toledo exhibition just because of the Michelle Obama connection.

VALERIE STEELE: (Laughs) And some people will understand how an exhibition, and the book Yale University Press will publish around the same time as the exhibition opens, June 17 until September 26, really works. We have been working on this for almost two years.

BILLY: In other words, long before the Isabel Toledo dress was even a twinkle in Mrs. Obama’s eye?

VALERIE: Yes.

BILLY: The dress was controversial, with great debate about it in the media during the time of the Inauguration. From your scholarly perspective, as fashion or “costume,” as some academics prefer to say, what is the historical significance of Mrs. Obama’s Inauguration Day ensemble by Isabel Toledo?

VALERIE: I would say the significance of wearing Isabel’s lemongrass-colored dress and coat is that it was not red, or white, or blue, the traditional colors worn by First Ladies on Inauguration Day or any historic day for that matter.

BILLY: What else?

VALERIE: Clothes don’t make the role, but they do augment it. The historic significance of Michelle Obama’s fashion sense is how “dress” can present an image, in this case the image of her husband’s administration as young and idealistic. Also, as multicultural, choosing designers like Isabel or Jason Wu reinforces the message of diversity, of youth and of excitement.

BILLY: The First Lady, compared certainly to other First Ladies, is very independent.

VALERIE: Her clothing choices, ranging from Isabel Toledo to J. Crew are also historically significant because they speak to accessible glamour, a mix, the future of retailing and also democratization on so many levels — including the body ideal.

BILLY: The body ideal?

VALERIE: Michelle Obama is tall and articulated, but she isn’t a model, she isn’t skinny. Yet, she has these strong arms, and strong arms — perhaps of any body part you can work on and develop in the gym — are the most responsive to training and, therefore, also very accessible.

BILLY: If suddenly you were handed umpteen thousand dollars to create an exhibition about Michelle Obama’s fashion — I know it really is way too early in her tenure as First Lady to answer this — but what would you call the exhibition, what would be your organizing principle?

VALERIE: Color, I think, color and pattern. She so conspicuously wears brilliant and unusual colors and also patterns, some patterns more successful than others, but the rich, jewel-tone colors she has worn have been so amazingly successful. By wearing all these bold colors, she is sending a real message of optimism. Historically “color,” when it surfaces in any period of time, is very powerful. Like Pauline Trigère said, “Feeling blue? Wear red.”

BILLY: Although he backtracked on “The View” and tried to soften his comments, Oscar de la Renta was very outspoken in sharing his annoyance that Mrs. Obama has not yet worn anything by America’s most established designers, like Oscar, or Ralph Lauren, especially when she was in Europe recently. She wore Isabel and Jason Wu, among other young designers and then, very diplomatically in France, she wore Azzedine Alaia, a trendy French designer. Do you recall there ever being a controversy like this before?

VALERIE: Not really. The only controversy I can think of even vaguely like it is over nationalism. In the 19th century, for instance, American magazines railed because they could not understand how the daughters of Puritan ancestors could wear clothes designed by those “wicked people in Paris.”