American royalty gets married

Real Simple Magazine recently published some great images of America's "royalty" getting married. If I would have been able to attend just one of these weddings it would have been that of Jackie Bouvier Kennedy's, I think she would of had some good cake. Here are a few of my favorite dresses...

Gloria Vanderbilt

On December 28, 1941, days after America entered World War II, the world-famous teenage heiress married Pasquale di Cicco in Santa Barbara, California. Vanderbilt, whose fitted-and-draped satin-and-tulle gown had a 30-foot-long train, divorced him a few years later, just as she was coming into her $4.5 million inheritance.



Elizabeth Taylor

Thousands of fans lined the streets outside the Church of the Good Shepherd in Beverly Hills on May 6, 1950, to catch a glimpse of 18-year-old Taylor in her sweetheart-necked satin wedding gown, a $1,500 design presented to her by MGM. Her marriage, to hotel heir Conrad “Nicky” Hilton, went south within months, and the actress would walk the aisle seven more times.

Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy

Not quite eight years before she became the first lady, the onetime “debutante of the year” married Senator John F. Kennedy in Newport, Rhode Island, on September 12, 1953. Her dress, said to have required 50 yards of fabric, was ivory tissue silk.

Grace Kelly

Kelly wed Prince Rainier III of Monaco on April 19, 1956, in a lace, silk taffeta, and tulle gown with a fitted bodice and flared skirt created by Helen Rose, MGM’s costume designer. Kelly gave up Hollywood, where she held the title of Oscar winner, to become Her Serene Highness the Princess of Monaco.

Luci Baines Johnson

When Johnson married Air National Guardsman Patrick Nugent on August 6, 1966, before some 700 guests and 55 million television viewers, it was a wedding to which “nobody [was] invited except the immediate country,” a comedian quipped. So it’s not surprising that she set a trend with her A-line taffeta Priscilla of Boston gown, which featured a nine-foot-long Watteau court train that fell from between her shoulder blades. Three years later, her sister, Lynda Byrd, would wed in the East Room wearing a high-necked white silk-satin Empire sheath by Geoffrey Beene.

Tricia Nixon

A few years after her younger sister, Julie, declined a White House ceremony—marrying David Eisenhower in New York City just weeks before her president-elect father assumed office—Nixon married Harvard law student Edward Cox on June 12, 1971, in the first-ever Rose Garden wedding. After a slight rain delay, the petite bride appeared in a lovely pearl-and-lace-trimmed silk organdy design with a lower-cut neckline that supposedly dismayed her mother. The dress was by Priscilla of Boston, as her sister’s had been.

Jenna Bush

Bush married business student Henry Hager in a low-key May 10, 2008, ceremony at her family’s ranch near Crawford, Texas. The bride, who went veil-less in a beautifully embroidered organza Oscar de la Renta gown, was given away by her father, President George W. Bush.