After Poppy Delevingne had 48 hen parties and 3 wedding ceremonies (ok we exaggerate - but only just), the stakes were set high in the 'It' girl wedding arena. What was 28-year-old glossy style maven Olivia Palermo going to wear to her own nuptials to brawny German model Johannes Huebl? Would there be a bespoke Chanel dress, hand-woven with crystals the size of small children? Perhaps there would be a minimalist waterfall of ivory silk, which sported a thirty-foot train carried by 12 identically dressed bridesmaids, with exquisite bone structure?
Well, it turned out to be quite the opposite; the antithesis of a showy slebby wedding. And there wasn't a wedding dress, in sight. Olivia got married yesterday in a small ceremony (family plus 2 friends) in Bedford, New York and wore a plain, crew-neck cream sweater, with a split tulle skirt - both by Caroline Herrera - and a pair of persian blue pumps by Manolo Blahnik, as her something blue. She looked typically polished and beautiful - but where was the pomp? Her fans cried. The ceremony? The all-out wedding frock?
Whilst Olivia looks perfectly happy in her wedding ensemble, some of the world was not. Her wedding sweater was instantly divisive, with Twitter a hotbed of 'hot or not' all morning. Ignoring the obvious fact that what a woman wears to her wedding is her own goddamn business, we can't deny that we discussed OPs wedding sweater at quite some length. Some of The Debrief found it dull and dowdy - for a woman who has deliberately built a career as a style maker, it was an unusual choice - whilst others saw it as chic and unassumingly unique.
Olivia has not commented on her alt bridal attire - but one woman who has written at length about the struggles of the bridal dress, is Everyday Sexism's Laura Bates. In a piece for The Guardian on Saturday, Laura admits that, as a feminist, she struggled with the symbolism (virginal, innocent, 'pure' and ready to be defiled) of a white wedding dress, although she ultimately felt that the white dress had been reclaimed by women. White, her dress shall be. Far more bothered, was she, about the sexism of the tradition of chucking a bunch of flowers, which only eager-to-be-wed women may catch (at her wedding, the men will join in) and the lack of female voices at the wedding reception. For Laura, the speeches will be 50/50 men and women.
Laura's piece makes you look at Olivia's humble cream sweater in quite a different light. '[The] breaking of the wedding "rules" sums up the modern-day feminist bride; eschewing some traditions [and] co-opting others', she writes. There is no doubt that with her cream sweater, Olivia was co-opting her wedding just as she damn well chose.
Follow Pandora on Twitter @pinsykes
Picture: Oliviapalermo.com
This article originally appeared on The Debrief.