Malia Obama Is a New Menswear Icon

It’s impressive, given Barack Obama’s reputation as the first “social media president,” that the former president’s daughters, 25-year-old Malia and 22-year-old Sasha, have managed to keep their digital lives almost entirely private—instead, we only see glamorous peeks into their daily routines the old-fashioned way (from tabloids). That said, the Obama girls are still the first First Daughters whose post-White House lives occupy not onlyTheDaily Mail’s endless-scroll webpages but also TikTok and X (née Twitter), where netitzens this week were nihilistically delighted to see photos of Malia Obama looking cool and timeless—which is to say, she was smoking a cigarette and wearing a great pair of pants.

Since graduating from Harvard in 2021, Malia has been living in Los Angeles, where she recently worked as a writer onDonald Glover’s Beyhive-inspired TV seriesSwarm. Taking a smoke break outside an LA convenience store, Malia wore an earth-toned croppedknit cardiganfrom the Australian brand Kina & Tam (whosewebsitedescribes its overall design philosophy as “dopamine dressing”), lug-soled black boots, and high-waisted pleated wool slacks. The trousers, to be sure, are the real stars of the show here; to borrow the words of myGQcolleague Avidan Grossman, they invoked “one dart, two pleats, zero notes.” Easygoing pants have been the anchor of Malia’s great recent menswear-y outfits: There was the combo of jaunty cinch-back canvas khaki pants, gray zip-up hoodie, andMars Yardsshe wore on a Los Angeles stroll early last year. A pair of green, raw-hemmed Assembly work pants and Y-Project hiking bootsfor a night outat Soho House. Slouchy knee-length denim shorts and Patta x New Balance 990son a Whole Foods runover the summer. (Meanwhile, Malia’s little sister, Sasha, is single-handedly bringing backoversized Dickies overalls.)

But back to this week. Wearing her waist-length braids loose down her back, Malia supplemented the look with two very contemporaryobjets de curiosités: a cigarette and a jumbo-sized insulated Hydro Flask water bottle. The water vessel isGen Z’s favorite virtuous accessory; nicotine is every generation’s most cinematic vice. The duality of man, one might say—or just a reflection of the overall state of things among the young, cool creative class in wellness-and-image-obsessed Los Angeles.

“Obama’s daughters smoking cigs is the return of monoculture,”postedThe New Yorkerwriter Naomi Fry, “and I for one am into it.” Because time is a flat circle, we’ve anecdotally swung back around from the Truth anti-tobacco campaign of the 2000s andyoung people are taking pleasure in blasting cigs again. (It’s hard to imagine that, even in their younger days, documentation of either of the Bush twinssmokingwould’ve evoked anything other than calamity.) Certainly, Malia and Sasha’s dadmade headlineswhen he stopped smoking over a decade ago, having referenced his daughters as the main reasons why he quit.

“Nothing beats watching your children become smarter and cooler than you are,” the former president unrelatedly told GQ in 2015. “And you suddenly will hear them say something or make a joke or have an insight and you go, ‘Wow. I didn’t think of that.’”