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Chelsea Clinton isn’t the first presidential
daughter who has tried to keep private the details of her wedding day.
“I feel that marriage vows are sacred, and I hope that mine will be
spared the hurly-burly attending a news event,” Margaret Truman said
before her 1956 nuptials in Missouri. At least she and the groom,
Clifton Daniel, consented to a press conference with 50 reporters.

But Clinton, 30, was silent in every way except one. Her dress told a lot.

Designed by Vera Wang, the strapless dress
consisted of a number of yards of ivory silk organza that had been
lightly gathered, with tulle pleated diagonally on the bodice. The
dress was finished with a silvery embroidered waistband, not unlike the
dresses with dark sashes that Wang showed in a bridal collection this
year.

It was a flattering dress on a woman with pretty
shoulders and a small waist, but it wasn’t an especially high-styled
choice. Wang also made the dress for Ivanka Trump’s wedding last year,
and its tight lace bodice and elbow-length sleeves, somewhat based on
the severe style of Grace Kelly’s bridal dress, reflected a
sophisticated taste.

In a similar vein, one also thinks of the
radically simple dress that Narciso Rodriguez did for Carolyn
Bessette’s marriage to John F. Kennedy Jr. in 1996. The success of that
dress – one of the most widely copied at the time – was all based on
its refined cut. And Bessette, who worked for Calvin Klein, probably
expected that it would have an impact.

Clinton’s dress, on the other hand, suggested a
completely different relationship with fashion – even, perhaps, an
ambivalent one. Her metamorphosis from a gawky, studious teenager to an
accomplished, self-assured young woman who prefers straight hair to
curly seemed to happen almost overnight, like the discovery, suddenly,
that she had a voice and was indeed, as Politico said in 2008, “a
significant surrogate” and not merely a “silent symbol.”

Still, we don’t really know anything about
Clinton’s style, and in a way her pretty dress, with its modestly
embellished waist and romantic layers, reflects a woman whose focus
isn’t directed in that way, and maybe isn’t that vain.

Before Saturday’s wedding in Rhinebeck, N.Y.,
there was a lot of speculation about who designed the dress – Wang or
Oscar de la Renta. A number of websites favored de la Renta, on the
grounds that he makes clothes for Secretary of State Hillary Rodham
Clinton and designed Jenna Bush’s sleeveless lace wedding dress in
2008. De la Renta also occasionally plays host to Clinton’s parents at
his home in the Dominican Republic.

But Clinton seems her own boss, and one way to
create a distinct experience is to have a separate dressmaker. Her
mother’s dark fuchsia dress was made by de la Renta.

Apart from Tricia Nixon Cox, who married in 1971
in the White House Rose Garden in a stunning Priscilla of Boston gown,
with “400 guests and 600 journalists,” according to a news report, the
daughters of American presidents are not attention-grabbers.

Amy Carter, wed in 1996, wore a 1920s dress, as
well as her glasses, and walked on a carpet of pine straw and magnolia
petals. Truman wore a fitted dress of beige Venetian silk, by the Roman
designer Micol Fontana.

White didn’t suit her, she said. Caroline Kennedy
wore a dropped-waist gown, by Carolina Herrera, sentimentally
embroidered with shamrocks.

Unlike Bush and many young brides nowadays,
Clinton wore her hair up, scraped away from her face in a somewhat
grand chignon. Bush, who wed at her parents’ ranch in Crawford, Texas,
and said she wanted everything to have an “organic” feel, also skipped
the veil.

Clinton’s wedding was black tie, therefore more
formal, but the sleek updo also betrayed the Clinton women’s
complicated hair history. Her minimal jewelry – a small bracelet,
earrings – seemed closer to her personality.

But that is just a guess. The tab for such a dress
would also be pure guesswork. Twenty thousand dollars? Perhaps. (Wang
said in an e-mail that she was not permitted to speak about the bride
or the details of her dress.) For the reception, Clinton changed into
an ivory silk tulle Grecian dress with a crisscross back and a black
grosgrain belt. Her bridesmaids each wore a strapless gown in lavender
chiffon with a plum-colored bow.

© 2010 New York Times News Service