From the runway to the Oval Office, EVERYTHING IS POSSIBLE for Tyra Banks. Bazaar casts her as First Lady while she reflects on being a model citizen and the politics of fashion. 
By LAURA BROWN

Tyra Banks is sitting on the huge corner sofa in her office in New York, impressing on her interviewer the fierceness of Abigail Adams. Resisting the obvious choice of Jackie Kennedy (”although she was a fox”), it’s the second first lady who has Banks in awe. “I watched the John Adams series on HBO, and I was so taken by her that I Googled everything I could,” she explains, straightening the folds of her businesslike-but-bodacious Zara sundress.

“She stood up for women. She was able to speak her mind about women’s issues with her man, and he actually, truly listened to her.”Today, though, it’s a rather more modern potential first lady who has Banks compelled. When it came to paying homage to Michelle Obama for this story, Banks found the process “surreal.” ”It’s kind of embarrassing,” she confesses, “but in my early 20s, I used to want to be a princess. But I didn’t want to have to marry somebody in order to do it! Of course, I don’t see the position of first lady as a princess, where it’s something you have to marry into. 

With Barack Obama, his becoming president is them becoming president because Michelle was there from the beginning. Without Michelle, he wouldn’t be there.” Or, as she pronounces to her Tyra Banks Show camera after her Oval Office portrait, “Michelle Obama, you’re one hot mama.”A number of presidential candidates have appeared on Banks’s talk show (Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, John Edwards), and she’s after Michelle Obama to appear this fall. She has met her before, noting she was “so warm and so gracious.   

She’s got that direct-eye-contact, truly-connecting thing. She’s not a ‘ha, ha, ha’ type.” She smiles and continues, “And I love that she’s tall.”"Being first lady is not just about being the wife but really taking command and having true vision,” Banks adds, noting the infinitely tricky terrain of being a woman in politics. ”Hillary Clinton was on my show in January, and I asked her, ‘Do you ever just get terrified to say anything? Because everything is so scrutinized and picked apart and dissected?’ And she said, ‘Honestly, Tyra, yes!’ And it’s the same for Michelle Obama, especially with her and Barack being the first, you know, in so, so many ways.”Banks, 34, in her own way, is a “first” too. 

Over her 19-year career, in front of both the fashion lens and the television camera, she has variously been anointed a supermodel, a “hero and pioneer,” and, of course, “the new Oprah.” (The New York Times Magazine also recently threw in a comparison to Martha Stewart.) And while she will joke that she got here — the host and executive producer of both America’s Next Top Model and the Emmy-winning The Tyra Banks Show, about to enter its fourth season, and one of Time magazine’s “People Who Shape Our World” — by being, yes, fierce, what’s cool about Banks, who now earns an estimated $23 million a year, is that she was never too cool to be commercial. By doing so, she hasn’t just broken borders — of ethnicity, of cynicism, of fashion cliché — she has broken ground.    

FULL STORY HERE: http://www.harpersbazaar.com/magazine/cover/tyra-banks-interview-0908