The US president's twin daughters have emerged from their media-free zone of comfort into the flattering spotlight of Vogue. The August issue of the fashion magazine includes an interview with the recent college graduates as well as two portraits by photographer Patrick Demarchelier, writes Robin Givhan
The opening picture features the two young women in strapless ballgowns. Jenna's ruby red dress is by Oscar de la Renta, a designer favoured by her mother. Barbara is wearing a similar ivory gown by Calvin Klein. They are accessorised with an array of borrowed diamonds. The dresses are classic styles a designer would keep on hand in the showroom but wouldn't put on the catwalk.
The 22-year-old twins look like débutantes, minor royals or that particular New York species of well-groomed, pedigreed and socially connected woman known as the "Bright Young Thing". For much of the time their father has been in the White House, they were kept under wraps. Occasionally, they emerged from their protected world to be snapped attending a fashion show or travelling with their mother. The only significant ink on them has been on police reports detailing their ill-advised underage drinking.
This public début is occasioned by their having graduated from college and deciding to campaign for their father. "The decision was completely up to Jenna and Barbara," says Gordon Johndroe, the first lady's press secretary. "They thought this would be a nice interview to start with."
Barbara made her campaign début on Tuesday, accompanying her father to Michigan and Minnesota. Jenna's first foray was last week. So far, they have been quiet cheerleaders and are unsure of how they might ultimately be dispatched. But in Vogue, Jenna makes clear they are not interested in politics and are doing this for love of Dad.
Both the president and first lady have seen the story and the accompanying photographs and "they like it", Johndroe says. "They think their daughters look great and it's a nice article." What's not to like? The story notes that the daughters' post-graduation plans include Jenna's desire to work for a charter school and Barbara's interest in working with AIDS-afflicted children in Eastern Europe and Africa. Both have surrounded themselves with good friends who say such nice things about them that readers might be led to believe the two have never burped publicly, let alone had a grumpy day.
The story's headline promises that the daughters are about to "give the country a glimpse of who they really are by joining their father on the campaign trail". But those who spend any time on such trails argue that the goal is to reveal not one's real self but a perfectly polished, eloquently scripted facsimile.
The same can be said about making your début in Vogue. This is not the kind of magazine that traffics in humanising reality, or one that finds reassurance in warts, foibles and missteps.
People who appear in Vogue never look like their true selves - they look better. They become their own fantasy. The magazine put Oprah Winfrey on its cover in October 1998 and she admitted that at long last she was convinced of her own beauty. When Hillary Clinton appeared on the cover in December that year, during the impeachment proceedings, her spirit got such a boost that she thanked the magazine's editor in her autobiography. When Marion Jones appeared in 2001, the photographs not only reiterated the sex appeal of the athletic female physique but also pronounced it fashionable. And when Vogue shot Sean "P. Diddy" Combs in 1999, it helped legitimise Combs to the fashion establishment as an ebony-skinned Cary Grant and pronounced young minority millionaires among the logical heirs to couture.
In Vogue, everyone glows. People are more elegantly groomed and styled than they will ever be again. In the instant that their photograph is taken - when the stylists, the make-up artist, the hairdresser, the lighting person and the assistants have all stepped out of the frame - there is perfection.
The Vogue photographs of the Bush twins are coolly beautiful, aloof and controlled. The opening portrait, shot in Manhattan at the Queen Sofia Spanish Institute with the two women in classic ballgowns, could easily hang alongside those of their mother as first lady. "They've always shied away from the pampered, débutante image," says Julia Reed, author of the story. The clothes transform the daughters into archetypes; they do not reflect the personality of the wearers. Their début has all of the intimacy of a state dinner receiving line.
But the portrait does offer this: They are ready to play a new role. In the picture's formality and control, it reflects their emergence as public, political daughters. - (Washington Post Service)
Eddie Holt is on leave