We're on the Trump jet (Palm Beach-New York), and we're debating whether or not Donald Trump and his fiancée, Melania Knauss, should accept NBC's offer to broadcast their wedding live, in prime time. It's late November, and the big day is just two months away. We, I should say, include Donald and Melania; some business guys; Vogue's André Leon Talley; Donald's three grown children (by Ivana); Paolo Zampolli, the modeling agent at whose party Donald and Melania met six years ago; and a miscellany of close friends and associates, most of whom are watching Midnight Cowboy on the big screen. The other choices: Deliverance and Forrest Gump. Donald has strong views on movie stars, namely that it's all been downhill since Cary Grant and Clark Gable. Were he to take over Hollywood, only Tom Hanks, and maybe Harrison Ford, would not be summoned to the boardroom and fired. "Jude Law is nothing," Donald says about the man who just pipped him to the title of Sexiest Man Alive. He says with genuine bafflement, "I don't get it. He's got nothing." Everybody on the jet nods in agreement—in Melania's case, with a sparkle in her eye.
One of the most endearing things about the couple is their habit of shooting each other humorous and teasing looks. "He interacts with her in a very unique way," Ivanka, his 23-year-old daughter, tells me later. "Obviously they're in love. I think they're going to be together forever."
The near-unanimous verdict on the jet is that yes, the wedding should be televised. Trump is intrigued by the prospect: "There hasn't been a live wedding since the royal wedding," he points out, wolfing down Oreos. ("I go to the finest restaurants in the world," he told me earlier. "But where can I get a better dessert than this?" Not at the Trump Tower penthouse. Said Melania, "We don't have Oreos at home. We don't have junk food.") The lone voice in favor of privacy is, it turns out, mine: There are certain realities, I suggest, that do not need to be on television. Donald—with characteristic mischievousness and commercial obsession—brings my attention to another reality: "Three hours in prime time? That's $25 million in advertising." Melania sits quietly while the chorus of excited yea-sayers cheer Donald on. ("It's NBC" is the killer argument.) Then she says with a laugh, "Doesn't anybody care what the bride wants?" She turns to Donald, "You said, 'Do everything and I'll just turn up.'"
"That's right, I did," Donald admits. "I'll just turn up in my suit. Black tie."
"You're wearing a white tie," Melania informs him, "and a white cummerbund. They're already hanging in your closet." (All by Brioni.)
Donald laughs delightedly. "Isn't she spectacular? Aren't I lucky?"
Yes, Donald, you are. Not least because Melania puts an end to any talk of a live feed from the altar at Mar-a-Lago (the Trump residence and private resort in Palm Beach). "Oh," she tells me with another laugh a day or two after the jet has safely landed, "of course it's not going to be on television." For a 34-year-old Slovenian girl with an accent last heard when the Gabor sisters stormed America in the fifties, she navigates the surreal and competitive and over-the-top and altogether disorienting Trump universe—all that crystal, all that celebrity, all that slippery marble, all that galactic cash, all that Donald—with marvelous aplomb and quiet dignity. The key is the same combination of beauty and sweetness and firmness that used to make Cary Grant and Jimmy Stewart fall flat on their faces: Donna Reed had it, Doris Day had it, Grace Kelly had it. … "She has this funny way of handling him," says Donald's long-standing friend Norma Foerderer. "She's amused by some of his antics: She just looks at him and her eyes twinkle. It's very tender." Melania is a confident woman; as Pamela Gross, her friend and the editorial director of the society magazine Avenue, says, "She really knows who she is, and she's in love with this man. She wants to be with him." Gross adds, "To be her friend, you have to have enough self-esteem to get over the fact that she's a bombshell. I used to go home and stick my head in the oven. She's so beautiful it's otherworldly, but so sweet you can't hate her for it. Humor takes a great cleverness, which Melania has; she's very quick, very subtle."
What this means is that when Melania began to think about her wedding dress—this was back in May—she came to Vogue for advice. There was a back story to this move: Donald popped the question (and handed over the twelve-carat, $1.5 million sparkler from Graff) on the night of the "Dangerous Liaisons" Costume Institute Ball, cosponsored by Vogue; and Melania happened to be wearing an Atelier Versace couture dress, inspired by Baz Luhrmann's Moulin Rouge!, that Donald had bought at a Vogue auction. (He enjoyed the bidding so much that, to the thunderous applause of all present, he outbid himself from $27,000 to $30,000. Sold! to the gentleman with the iconic comb-over.) So the magazine and she had a history of milestone dresses; and no dress is more milestone-y than the one that walks you down the aisle.
At the meeting with Anna Wintour, Vogue's editor in chief, and André Leon Talley, who would act as her couture mentor, Melania made her aesthetic clear: The wedding was to be a vision of white and gold and "jewelry" (translation: diamonds). Her dress was to be close-fitting and glamorous, with a revealing décolleté. She loved Valentino and Chanel; she loved Louis Vuitton for going-away luggage; and as regards shoes, she was a Manolo fanatic (slingback 105s, please).
So before you could say Ljubljana, it was off to Paris in July for the haute couture; and before you could say Louboutin (whose black feathered heels Melania finds "so sexy"), it was off to the Christian Dior show in the Bois de Boulogne. Melania wore a beaded Dior top (very Raquel Welch), Levi's 518s (her favorite jean, even before she became a spokesmodel for the company), and Manolos. "You look gorgeous," chirped Elizabeth Hurley, herself a proponent of the skinny jean and flashy cami. It was Melania's first-ever experience of the couture runway, and it opened to the strains of "The Girl Can't Help It." While even veteran onlookers were startled by the extreme corseting and perilous footwear and wild Kabuki makeup, Melania kept her focus on the task at hand: finding a wedding dress. (She even managed to not be distracted by the presence, on the other side of the catwalk, of the first Mrs. Trump, who did show signs of distraction.) An off-the-shoulder Edwardian stunner with a swirling marabou hem was deemed "almost"; a gown of draped blue satin with silver embroidery and brooches drew swoons.
After the show Melania went backstage with Manolo Blahnik in a state of bedazzlement. "Every shape in white satin, with all the brooches, is perfect," Melania said. As regards the show's actual wedding dress—an enormous shimmering white number with silver embroidery and satin petals over the breasts, which John Galliano describes as "a cross between a fifties pinup and the Austrian empress Sissi"—she said nothing until later that evening, when she ran into Gayle King, Oprah Winfrey's right hand, on the way into Valentino. "When I saw the wedding dress," Gayle said to her, "I thought, I wonder if Melania is taking notes." Melania answered, "Not that one. You can't walk in it."
At Valentino—Melania adores Valentino—she was most excited by non-nuptial ideas: a white mink coat with sparkly trim and a very sexy, long black tulle dress with jet-beaded chevrons, shown appropriately to the sound track of Diamonds Are Forever. Melania was not distracted by the presence, across the catwalk, of Princess Rosario of Bulgaria, wearing exactly the same beaded white cocktail dress; the princess, on the other hand, did seem distracted. Melania has that effect on people: As she went in and out of the shows, photographers would snap her without any idea of who she was. As Manolo Blahnik himself whispered to me, "She is a true beauty. She has it." That night, at a dinner to inaugurate Louis Vuitton's fine-jewelry line—Melania is a big fan of Marc Jacobs—a European journalist remarked in a vexed tone, "Why don't I have Bond girl with me?"
The next day began, elegantly enough, with Chanel—to which Melania, elegantly enough, wore Chanel. André Leon Talley had advised her before we left for Paris not to synchronize her clothes with the shows she would be attending. "That's old," he cautioned. But Melania, who is more concerned with being respectful and polite than being young and hip, clearly was doing it her way. Karl Lagerfeld seemed thrilled to see her in a nubbly and baubled tweed ensemble; it's always a joy to see a gorgeous girl in your ladylike designs.
The young/old debate resurfaced at the Vuitton store, where André advocated for a set of Murakami'd Vernis suitcases for the honeymoon. "Too young," countered Melania, who preferred the classic LV. "Young is good," explained André to a woman 20 years his junior.
André wasn't just talking about age and its perquisites. He used "young" in its fashion sense, as shorthand for fresh, directional, and challenging rather than conforming. Melania takes only an incidental interest in such priorities. Sure, she wears Marc Jacobs cashmeres and round-toed pumps, jeans from Levi's and Seven, and dresses and tops from Chloé; her daily wardrobe is full of youthful and casual bits. But the way she wears them (pulled together, with a good heel and a Birkin bag and real jewelry) signals that her preoccupations are not those of the reigning style tribes. She is wedded to a slightly old-fashioned idea of femininity; even Mario Testino could not get her to sit for a portrait with her makeup off. And she is also wedded to an image she has developed, which she long ago decided suits her personally and suits her position as consort to Donald Trump. "Melania likes plain, elegant things," says her friend Serena Boardman. "She never wears prints. She always looks very appropriate, but she is dating an older man. I've never seen her looking a mess, with her hair pulled on top of her head."
Which is precisely how the fashion world would love to see her. Never mind: Melania has bigger fish to fry. She is, after all, an integral part of the billion-dollar Trump brand. When, at a dinner following Helmut Newton's memorial, Tom Ford repeatedly told her to do something about her fiancé's hair, she answered with a smile, "I like him the way he is." This self-assured riposte is underpinned by the simple fact that if Melania had wanted to marry Lenny Kravitz or otherwise lead a fashionably correct existence, she could have. (Yes, Donald, you are lucky. It's not merely that Melania is more virtuous and loving than she is beautiful—and she is even more beautiful in reality than she is in pictures—it's that she has chosen to love you.)
Which brings us neatly back to the clothes. At her Dior appointment to try on the extraordinary creations shown the day before, she climbed into the blue snowflaked stunner, clutched it to her bosom, and requested a fitting in New York for September. At Valentino, the designer and she discussed a transformation of the black runway sample into something white and bridal. Sketches were promised. At Balenciaga, where she stopped by to check out the resort offerings (what could be better for Mar-a-Lago than a little Parisian resort?), a draped blue dress from the re-edition line transformed her into a young Sophia Loren. "It's so romantic," she said, sighing. The dress looked so good—so "young"—that she wore it to the Lacroix show, finally breaking the habit of wearing the house to the house. Then it was back to the Ritz to meet Olivier Theyskens and try on his enormous ball gowns, which if rendered in sugar and cream would have made a fantastic Barbie cake for a seven-year-old. Day two was rounded off with a dinner-dance at Valentino's astonishingly opulent and beautiful château, attended by a cadre of young European royals and America's own monarch Oprah the First, boogying to "It's Raining Men."
Day trios saw pleasant but ultimately unproductive visits to Jean Paul Gaultier (the final show of the season) and Chanel (an appointment). Melania tried on some tweeds at the rue Cambon but couldn't imagine spending the tens of thousands of dollars simply for something to go away in. Gaultier was gorgeous but too theatrical for her taste. (Let the record show that a few seats away, the first Madame Trump was keenly taking notes.) After a quick lunch at the Ritz—club sandwich and diet Coke, her usual—it was off to the airport and a commercial flight back to New York.
September is the month when the French couture houses drift across the Atlantic to do fittings, and we—Melania, her guru André Leon Talley, and I—met up again in New York. By then Melania, who never hired a wedding planner, had made a rash of decisions. There would be no bridesmaids; her older sister, Ines, a designer from Slovenia, would serve as maid of honor (in Vera Wang). The invitations were going to be "designed" by her and made by Tiffany & Co. Jean-Georges Vongerichten was personally going to cook the wedding banquet (menu still be to decided). And the cake—five-foot-high Grand Marnier chiffon layered with Grand Marnier buttercream and covered with 3,000 white roses—would be assembled by her pastry chef, who produces fantastical birds and flowers out of sugar and icing for the weekly brunch in Mar-a-Lago. For dessert each guest would also get a mini-wedding cake of chocolate truffle; toasts would be made with Cristal.
Most important, the flowers and the tables were the subject of a Survivor-style competition between three top New York floral decorators. Each submitted a table setting for her examination, and she finally went with Preston Bailey, who had magically fulfilled the commission of harmonizing an intimate white-and-gold setting with the Versailles-like proportions of the wedding ballroom. White satin cutwork lace would be overlaid on white brocade damask; the white linen napkins wrapped with six white dendrobium orchid heads; and white hydrangeas bunched with white tea roses, cattleya orchids, ranunculus, stephanotis, and gardenias (for scent).
The first New York fitting was for Christian Dior in the Plaza Athenée. A summer spent grappling with the details of the wedding had sharpened Melania's conception of her aesthetic. She decided quickly that, contrary to her first thoughts, the Dior bridal dress—90 meters of white satin, 550 hours of embroidery—was a drama that she could handle after all. "This is a dress you could only wear for a wedding," she said to me. "It's like, wow!" Dior, you're hired!
The dress would require further fittings and adjustments. All the flaps over the breasts disappeared (André: "Are we sure about these wings?" Melania: "No, no, no"), and the girdle was nipped so that the bride's figure would not be lost in the extraordinary volume of the skirt ("It needs to be tighter, really tight, so you see my body, you see behind, and then … "). She also commissioned a Dior page's outfit for seven-year-old Cameron, son of the TV producer Mark Burnett: When she suggested a jacket and breeches for the young man, André Leon Talley firmly moved to change that to a shirt and shorts.
One issue remained: "The problem is," Melania said, "how do I walk around in this?" Catherine Rivière, Galliano's superelegant and severe directrice of couture, replied, "You just do. You wanted a dress for a princess." André added, "This is a heavy dress, Melania, so eat, drink, and be healthy or you will faint."
The plan evolved to (1) avoid putting flowers on the side of the runway—sorry, aisle—where they might be knocked over; (2) wear Manolos featuring diamanté anklets; (3) superstitiously wear a borrowed Fred Leighton necklace, blue underpinnings by La Perla, and carry an old rosary—"Why carry a bouquet? Just to follow tradition?"; (4) drive back to Mar-a-Lago in the Maybach (the Dior is huge; the Maybach's huger!); (5) sit on a bench for the dinner, because a chair would not work; (6) dance the first dance with her husband; (7) then immediately change into a new outfit in which to party by the pool. Question: where to find this new outfit?
The answer, it seemed in November, was a Valentino dress, from the spring 2005 collection, with a lace bodice, a wide jeweled empire band, and cascades of chiffon. But various glitches (reconstructing the bustline, rethinking the drape of the skirt, and the fact that the atelier was in Rome) undermined the project, and in the end Vera Wang rode to the rescue with a diaphanous tulle dress that was sexy and modern and could be fitted in New York by the designer herself, who happens to be a Mar-a-Lago pal of Melania.
Melania has a perfect body, but only she really understands how its proportions work. And Wang is an expert at making women look fantastically themselves. When Melania wanted her shoulders completely bared—"I feel more in proportion"—Wang gently overruled her with "You're not going out unless your body looks great, believe me." Wang agitated in favor of deconstructed, raggedy hems and straps ("If it wasn't a wedding dress, I'd tear up everything"), but Melania prevailed with her non-fashion, everything-in-its-place sensibilities. In other words, "old" trumped "young" again.
But not at the expense of a certain modernity. "Real chic," says Pamela Gross, "is not just a matter of what you're wearing, it's what you're emanating. Melania has raised the bar. Her focus is about loving him. There's something very modern about it. She knows who she is enough to be that." The new Mrs. Trump (and, yes, she is taking his name) is someone who wants her life to be about love and beauty and children (and, yes, they want kids) rather than professional acclaim or coolness or society. Melania Trump, in other words, will be the housewife other housewives are desperate to be. But as Serena Boardman observes, "It's not a situation where she's what you'd typically imagine. She's not his trophy or ornament. She's his partner and confidante." And it's true: Onboard the jet, and indeed every time I saw them together in the months leading up to the big day, Melania and Donald were in a state of incessant consultation and hilarity. "There might be an age difference, there might be a nationality difference," says Boardman, "but it certainly is a meeting of the minds." When you have that kind of thing going on, you're so cool you're beyond fashion. Although a little (make that a big) Dior dress never does a girl any harm. -- Sally Singer
Dior Haute Couture white satin hand-beaded and embroidered wedding dress. Fred Leighton necklace. Worth around $100,000 - $200,000 usd and as for "The Donald," his tuxedo will be custom made by Brioni ($14,000 usd).
"You're not going out unless your body looks great, believe me," affirmed designer Vera Wang, who designed this dress, left, to dance following the wedding dinner. Vera Wang silk tulle Grecian dress. Vivid Collection bracelet. Right: Dior Haute Couture white satin hand-beaded and embroidered wedding dress. Fred Leighton necklace.
Photo: Mario Testino
