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December 07, 2006

My World Is Not Bush's World

When I got married twenty years ago, my dad told me he would buy my wedding dress. I just had to pick it out and he would pay for it. The whole world of wedding gowns was spread out before me and I could choose what I wanted. But I simply could not stomach asking my dad to pay for an expensive designer gown that I would wear for only one day. The most important dress of my life cost $500, and even that made me choke. Perhaps I'm ridiculously frugal, or maybe my sense of scale is off a bit from that of most women. But I am having a hard time accepting the notion that First Lady Laura Bush spent $8500 on a dress for this year's White House holiday reception.

Granted, she is the First Lady, it's a big event, and all those people who think life is all about fashion come out to critique everyone, but honestly, you can find some absolutely luscious dresses for much less, and it was, after all, just a one-time holiday party. Does it really matter if the dress had an Oscar de la Renta label? Am I entirely out of touch with reality? Do I just lack class?

I find the cost of the dress much more shocking than what has the fashion world all in a tizzy – the fact that three other women wore the exact same $8500 dress to the party. While I am amazed that someone other than the First Lady would spend $8500 on a dress for a holiday party, it is the horror of showing up and seeing someone else in the same dress that has the fluff-headed fashion critics all atwitter, using words like "debacle" and "mess."

You see, when Jacqueline Kennedy was First Lady, don't you know, "she made sure, and her couturiers made sure that nobody else wore that dress that season." The implication, of course, is that Mrs. Kennedy was truly classy, while Mrs. Bush only pretends to be. Because any fashionable lady would realize that having others wear the same dress is not acceptable and take appropriate steps to ensure such a debacle does not occur. But while they're gossiping about the problem of duplicate dresses, I'm obsessed with the thought that people actually have couturiers, and they can dictate to a dress designer like Oscar de la Renta that a particular dress can no longer be sold for the rest of the season.

Mrs. Bush ended up going upstairs and changing into another dress. Which makes me even more baffled at the expenditure of $8500 for the dress. If she already had another dress that would suffice, why buy the new one? I feel pretty decked out if I'm wearing $200 worth of clothing at any given time. But $8500? Wow, at the rate I buy new clothes, it would probably take me ten or fifteen years to spend that much money, and most of what I bought would be for my kids. I must live in a different world.

Posted by Becky at December 7, 2006 10:20 AM