Paper Monitor
11:02 UK time, Monday, 2 August 2010
A service highlighting the riches of the daily press.
Weddings have always been a social minefield for Paper Monitor. What to wear? With whom to mingle? And how to brazen out consuming the maximum quantity of free food and alcohol having spent the minimum possible on gifts for the happy couple?
And now there's a new of etiquette to negotiate: fuchsia.
The pronunciation of this colour is one which has vexed Magazine readers in the past. But what actually constitutes this tricky shade is something that appears to divide the Times's top writers.
In his report on Chelsea Clinton's marriage to Marc Mezvinsky, Tim Teeman describes the dress worn by the mother of the bride (also known as US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, pictured right with the happy couple) as "a fuchsia-coloured Oscar de la Renta gown". In an adjacent sidebar, however, deputy fashion editor Carolyn Asome describes Ms Clinton's frock as being "pale burgundy".
Paper Monitor is no expert, but had always imagined fuchsia and burgundy (however pale) as being quite different. Perhaps the Times's style guide should be updated accordingly, unless readers can advise otherwise.
Not every correspondent is so fixated on colour charts. According to Daniel Bates of the Daily Mail, some £6,400 was spent on each guest, the couple exchanged vows under a "flower-adorned gazebo" and the bride insisted on an "infidelity clause" in their pre-nuptial agreement, meaning Mr Mezvinsky will lose any claim to her fortune should he fail to adhere to his vows.
For the Daily Telegraph - disdainful of an event populated by the US Democratic party establishment - highlights instead its observation that "celebrity guests were thin on the ground". It continues:
Instead of an anticipated guest list that had included Oprah Winfrey, Steven Spielberg and Sir John Major, star watchers had to make do with sightings of the husband-and-wife actors Ted Danson and Mary Steenburgen, the former secretary of state Madeleine Albright, the film producer Steve Bing and the dress designer Vera Wang.
Is Sir John Major really on an equivalent star billing with Ms Winfrey and Mr Spielberg? Can he even be closer to the A-list than Mr Danson, whose celebrity status has admittedly waned since the heyday of Cheers? To readers of the Daily Telegraph, it would appear that he is.
The Guardian, a paper which rarely fails to be entranced by American liberal glitter, leaps gallantly to the bride's defence. The lack of showbiz names, it insists, was "in tune with the family event that the woman at its centre had wanted it to be".
At last, someone has made the bride feel that her big day was special. Paper Monitor notes approvingly that wedding etiquette has not died out entirely.
The 
