TONIGHT Laura Bush will step into an ice-blue-and-silver embroidered tulle dress by Oscar de la Renta, draping a matching duchess-satin coat over the top for the inaugural ball that is the centre of four days of ceremonies to mark her husband’s second term as President. Tomorrow the world’s critics — the official and the unofficial, the fashion-hot and the not-so-hot — will dissect the tiniest details of how she looked: the twist of her hair, the angle of her heels, the degree of her smile, that dress.
It is an elegant and appropriate, if conventional, choice. It is certainly less of a flashy cheerleader than the dress she picked for Bush’s first inauguration, a red Chantilly lace beaded confection by Michael Faircloth, a little-known Texan tailor.
Like most First Ladies, Mrs Bush has been reluctant to discuss her clothes. But can’t the same be said of many successful women whose lives do not revolve around clothes, even if they rather like to shop? Fashion still bears the (mostly self-inflicted) stigma of superficiality and hyperbole; it is an industry often hopelessly caught up in commerce and ego.
So it is not exactly a wonder that a First Lady necessarily consumed by the business of defining herself to the world’s public might want to avoid fashion’s awkward web. Yet in a job with no defined duties, in a position more aptly described as a role, public presentation is all. “I think,” Mrs Bush once said, “that Americans want to see the people who live in the White House dress in a dignified way.” The archaic needs of the President and his consort overwhelm the usual rules that might arise in the relationship between a woman and her husband and a woman and her wardrobe — costuming is vital. On the night of the Inauguration Ball the First Lady is a decorative wife — and little more.
In her everyday life a First Lady is supposed to set a very particular style and tone; too much interest in fashion is not to be trusted; neither is too little. Sticky questions are always close to hand: where did that dress come from? Who else has it? How much did it cost? For the record, Mrs Bush has paid for every item of her inaugural wardrobe, as have most First Ladies.
Her de la Renta gown symbolises those things every inaugural gown does: the dreamy romance of a ball and the optimism inherent in fresh starts. The tradition of the inaugural ball began in 1809, when James and Dolley Madison served punch and cake at the White House, and that was followed by an official ball at Long’s Hotel in Washington. When Madison took office that year, the US was in the throes of a crisis about its national identity; the republic was only 20 years old and lacked history, protocol, tradition. The only political conventions that Americans knew well were those of the British monarchy; new ones, more appropriate for a republic, had to be invented from scratch.
“There was a horror of anything that smacked of monarchy, but there was also a need for legitimacy,” says Catherine Allgor, an historian of First Lady style and author of Parlor Politics: In Which the Ladies of Washington Help Build a City and a Government. Dolley Madison, a fashion fan with a sense of occasion, met that need. The reaction to her appearance at the ball in a buff-hued velvet dress with a long train, and a turban crowned with two bird of paradise plumes, was rapturous.
It was not until after the Second World War that the balls turned into huge, grand affairs, although long before then First Ladies were aware of the necessity of style. Mary Lincoln shopped at Lord & Taylor in New York, then the slickest store in town;she was convinced that she should wear the finest fabrics. Eleanor Roosevelt, not usually remembered as much of a style icon, offered notes to the press about the inaugural outfits she wore when her husband took office during the Depression.
Unsurprisingly, it was Jackie Kennedy who created the precedent of glamour at the inauguration ceremonies. For her husband’s ball in 1961 she designed a gown herself, aiming to highlight her husband’s white tie and tails. It captivated the American public. With the growth of TV, such scrutiny intensified — and so did the pressure to strike the perfect note.
Now the formal balls that follow a presidential inauguration are the only Washington occasions when it is impossible to be overdressed; everything is piled on, and only a crown might look out of place.
Oscar de la Renta has always known how to help wealthy women who lead public lives to look their best, from Sarah Jessica Parker to Nancy Reagan and Hillary Clinton. They wear de la Renta’s clothes because they are pretty, they fit properly and they give a feeling of pedigree. He does not push sultry sex appeal or anything remotely avant-garde and his clothes are soft, pleasant, appealing — never strident nor startling to anybody. Crucially, his designs are feminine — a dress might have a bow around the waist or a gracefully curved collar — because tradition everywhere so often dictates that a woman who is public in most of her life must be fundamentally feminine if she is to navigate around suspicion and impossible expectations. But they also possess gravity, carrying an implication that the wearer has a backbone, but is certainly not a bore.
Edith Mayo, curator emeritus of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, where there is a permanent collection of First Ladies’ inauguration gowns, says that the First Lady has always had a delicate balance to keep. “We have a tendency to want to see them as the American version of royalty, but if they actually start dressing that way, we get really offended and critical,” she says. So Nancy Reagan, an eager habitué of many Fifth Avenue changing rooms, discovered, when she picked a one-shouldered white satin gown for her husband’s first inauguration in 1981. It was very of-the-moment (as well as very Dynasty) — which was exactly the problem. Fashion circles applauded, but everyone else saw only impudent glitz.
Few First Ladies get it right first time; levels of simplicity, sophistication and glamour increase in proportion to the length of term their husbands hold office. Shock was the reaction when Rosalynn Carter recycled a dress she had worn to her husband’s gubernatorial gala for his inauguration in 1977. “Dowdy!” was the verdict on the purple sequined dress Hillary Clinton wore for her husband’s first inauguration; by 1997 she had got the idea and, like Laura Bush, went from wearing the designs of an obscure creator to a big name, passing the test with a gold embroidered gown by de la Renta.
There have been some hits, too: Lady Bird Johnson’s yellow satin gown in 1965 was bang on the money with its clean classicism; Barbara Bush’s asymmetrically draped blue velvet dress in 1988 was stately, but not stiff. Both were well received.
Laura Bush has proved canny in matters of her wardrobe. She has begun the precautionary practice of authorising the maker of her inaugural dress to issue a sketch in advance. She is on good terms with industry magnates such as Anna Wintour, Editor of American Vogue, and she has taken to visiting designers in their showrooms to view their collections.
We care about what the First Lady wears because we think it might give us a clue to her relationship with her husband and, by extension, his relationship with the world. The inherent restrictions are the most interesting thing about the dresses chosen by First Ladies for the inaugural ball. Unlike most fashion, they cannot be allowed to reflect much sense of self — which makes the glimpses that they do permit even more fascinating.
