What's wrong with this picture?

The White House has released the first official portrait of First Lady Michelle Obama, but not everyone is happy about it.

The image, released last week, shows Obama in the Blue Room of the White House, wearing a double strands of pearls as she stands in front of a portrait of Thomas Jefferson. The photo was taken by Joyce N. Boghosian.

The problem, for some it seems, is that Obama appears in a sleeveless dress, which apparently sparked hundreds of complaints from some readers of the Chicago Tribune newspaper. "One reader summed it up better than most of them. She talked about how the season is winter, the occasion was business and a sleeveless dress was the wrong style at the wrong time," Chicago Tribune style reporter Wendy Donahue told ABC News.

More than 1,000 comments were posted on the photo after it appeared in the Huffington Post last week as well.

But others defended the first lady, who has worn sleeveless dresses on other occasions, including at her husband's address to a joint session of Congress last week. Mrs. Obama also appeared sleeveless on the covers of Vogue and People magazine recently too.

Detroit Free Press style writer Julie Hinds noted that Jackie Kennedy and Nancy Reagan also wore sleeveless dresses when they served as first lady, but apparently neither generated as much controversy for doing so.

But the headline in Hinds's article might have answered the question better than any other. The headline simply said:

"Why sleeveless? Because Michelle Obama can."