*Originally published in Japanese in Forbes JAPAN on September 18, 2026.
English translation by the author.
When executive presence is discussed through the lens of appearance, the conversation tends to move quickly toward a familiar set of answers: wear colors that project authority, choose fabrics that signal quality, select accessories that don’t distract. All reasonable advice. All still relevant.
But it accounts for only part of what presence actually is. And in today’s global environment — where audiences are more visually literate and more skeptical of performance than ever before — the part it leaves out is where the real work happens.
That missing piece is what I’d call *reading the story of the room*.
In June 2026, New York City First Lady Rama Duwaji appeared at the Knicks championship victory parade in an upcycled patchwork top made from the team’s own graphic T-shirts, paired with a vintage rental skirt. I wrote about the specifics of her look in my previous column. Here, I want to go deeper — into the principles her presence illustrates, and what they mean for anyone navigating a public role.
The Story of the Room
If this had been an inauguration ceremony or a formal state dinner, classic, authoritative dressing would have been the right call. The weight of the occasion calls for a corresponding weight in appearance.
But a basketball championship parade is an entirely different context. People line the streets before dawn, wearing team T-shirts, holding signs, shouting. The energy is collective, joyful, loud. The “story of the room” — or in this case, the story of the street — is one of shared celebration between the city and its team.
Arriving in a structured blazer and formal trousers would not have been neutral. It would have communicated distance. The authority that such an outfit conveys in a boardroom becomes, in that context, a signal that you’ve misread the moment.
Rama’s top was made from the same Knicks T-shirts the people on the sidewalk were wearing. She shared the fabric of the crowd while elevating it into something singular. This is not casual dressing — it is precise dressing. She read the story of the room and responded to it with her own visual language.
Executive presence does not mean projecting the same image in every setting. It means understanding what each context calls for, and expressing yourself in a way that is both responsive to that context and consistent with who you are.
When Intent and Authenticity Are the Same Thing
Here is a distinction that matters: there is a difference between intentional choices and manufactured ones — and audiences can feel the difference.
Rama’s looks are clearly considered. For her husband’s inauguration, she worked with stylist Gabriella Karefa-Johnson — former Global Contributing Editor at US Vogue — to build an outfit from rentals, vintage pieces, and independent designers. At the victory parade, she wore Sullivan’s upcycled top with a vintage skirt from Albright Fashion Library. Every choice carries a point of view.
But the intention doesn’t feel imposed from the outside, because it isn’t. Rama had been buying vintage and wearing independent designers long before she became First Lady. She was involved in the visual identity of her husband’s campaign — weighing in on icons and typography. On election night, she wore a laser-cut denim top by Palestinian-Jordanian designer Zeid Hijazi. At the inauguration, she wore a custom coat by Palestinian-Lebanese designer Cynthia Merhej. At New York Fashion Week, she sat front row at Diotima. And at the parade, she appeared in Miss Claire Sullivan.
What connects these choices is not a press strategy. It is a consistent set of values — support for independent creators, cultural specificity, sustainability, and an aesthetic sensibility that she has cultivated over years. Because the intention is rooted in something real, it doesn’t read as calculated. It reads as her.
This is where the concept of presence gets complicated — and interesting. Presence is not just what you project in a given moment. It is the accumulated weight of how you’ve shown up over time, making itself visible. When what you wear aligns with what you’ve always believed, you don’t need to explain it. People feel the coherence.
Who Wears It Is Everything
Consider this: if another First Lady had worn the exact same patchwork Knicks top, would it have landed the same way?
Almost certainly not. It would have read as a try-hard moment, or an eccentric choice that didn’t quite make sense. Not because the item itself is wrong — but because the person wearing it and the story they carry wouldn’t have matched.
The same dynamic plays out in business all the time. A leader who shows up to a casual off-site in jeans and a T-shirt can look completely at ease — if that’s genuinely how they move through the world. The same outfit on a leader who lives and breathes formality reads as a costume. The clothes haven’t changed. The person has.
Presence is not the performance of a single moment. It is the residue of consistent choices over time — made visible. And people are remarkably good at sensing the difference between someone who has earned a look and someone who is simply wearing it.
This is where I often push back on executive presence training that focuses too heavily on the “how to appear” side of things. Appearing is learnable. But the appearance without the substance behind it eventually cracks. The real question is: *How have you been showing up, over time?* That accumulated reality is what presence is made of.
Rama’s presence works because she is not asking, “How should a First Lady look?” She is asking, “Who am I — as an artist, as someone with these values and this background — and how do I show up in this new role, as myself?” The answer to that question took 28 years to develop. The parade outfit was simply one expression of it.
Getting Ahead of the Criticism
There is one more dimension worth examining — one that is often overlooked in discussions of public presence, but that any leader in a visible role will eventually face.
In 2020, when Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez appeared on the cover of *Vanity Fair*, a British tabloid calculated the total value of the clothing and jewelry she wore across the shoot — approximately $14,000 — and published it as an indictment of a self-described democratic socialist. Never mind that the items were loans for a photo shoot, assembled by a stylist, as is standard practice. The number became ammunition.
Rama and her stylist Gabriella Karefa-Johnson appear to have been aware of exactly this dynamic. For the inauguration, the sourcing of each piece — rental, vintage loan, independent purchase — was made explicit from the start. They removed the ammunition before it could be loaded.
Shannon Hoey, founder of New York Vintage, noted what that choice communicated beyond the defensiveness: “By borrowing rather than buying, she wasn’t just giving new life to an archive piece. She was quietly making a case for sustainability, circular fashion, and the value of supporting small, independent businesses.”
Transparency, sustainability, pre-empting criticism, and supporting independent creators — a single sourcing decision carries all four of those messages simultaneously. That kind of layered intentionality, grounded in genuine values, is what separates presence from image management.
What You Bring Into the Room
I’ll close with the frame I find most useful when thinking about presence at this level.
Presence is not only about *what* you wear or *how* you carry yourself. It is about *which values, which cultural frameworks, which voices you bring with you* into a public space.
At the parade, Rama brought New York street culture, the energy of a city in celebration, the work of an emerging independent designer, a commitment to sustainable consumption, and the aesthetic sensibility of a Syrian-American artist who grew up between Houston, Dubai, and Brooklyn. All of that arrived with her, in a single outfit, on a public stage.
That is not fashion. That is leadership.
The old model expected political spouses to be broadly inoffensive — to present themselves in ways that wouldn’t disrupt the room. Rama’s model is different: to show up as herself, fully, and allow the role to be shaped by who she is — rather than the other way around.
She is not rewriting the dress code for First Ladies. She is simply following her own — the one she developed long before anyone was watching.
Presence, at its most powerful, is not what you construct for a moment. It is what you’ve built over a lifetime, becoming visible.
This is the second of two columns on Rama Duwaji. The first, on her background as an artist and the specifics of the parade look, can be found [here].
This article is part of Insights by Niena Etsuko Hino, a collection of selected English articles and translations exploring branding, executive presence, and cross-cultural business strategy.