The Wedding of the Year is over, and what have we learned? There was an interfaith ceremony; Bill lost the required weight, and then some; the cake was gluten-free. The wedding’s final price tag is still under wraps—Bryan Rafanelli, the Boston-based event planner who wrangled the affair, told the New York Times only, “I know Chelsea and Marc wanted to have the highest quality. That doesn’t mean the most expensive; it just means really a beautiful wedding.”
No matter how high-minded the intentions, however, you can’t save a wedding from itself. Father and daughter danced to “The Way You Look Tonight.” The bridesmaids—all twelve of them—were in Vera Wang wedding dresses dyed a particular shade of lavender, as no existing dress would do. And of course, there was Chelsea’s dress (actually, there were two—the bride changed into a Grecian Vera Wang gown for the reception). For the ceremony, she wore a strapless Vera Wang, its ivory silk organza accented with tulle on the bodice and silver beading on the waist. Though flattering, said Cathy Horyn in the Times, it was “not an especially high-styled choice”:
We do not really know anything about Ms. Clinton’s style, and in a way her pretty dress, with its modestly embellished waist and romantic layers, reflects a woman whose focus is not directed in that way, and maybe is not that vain.
What’s to be made of this dress-as-tea-leaves commentary? Predictable wedding choices, one would hope, suggest a woman who occasionally had better things to do this year than obsess over the details of one particular weekend; however, the reports that are trickling out hint at a fair amount of obsession all around. And so we find Chelsea in the same position as any other bride, one who is told that she should spare no expense—emotional or otherwise—in preparation for her special day, only to find her every choice questioned.
In a 2003 article about the wedding industry, Rebecca Mead wrote that “a bride’s anxiety—about her dress, about her mother-in-law, about the man she’s marrying—should be greeted as providing an opening for the self-assured salesperson.” And so cakes, flowers, favors, gift bags—anything that can be stamped with personality—have been transformed into a opportunity for self-expression. But with little other than the fairy-princess blueprint to go on, there’s often just one result: weddings that are a vessel for not only a lifetime’s worth of hopes and dreams, but also a bumbling attempt at redemption and womanly reinvention.
Perhaps Chelsea’s dress does indeed reveal a lack of focus and vanity, and maybe even pedestrian tastes. Or is it possible that, despite the designer pedigree, it’s just a dress?
Photograph: WireImage
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From New Yorker by Sally Law
