Lauren squared

in case you haven't put it together, i love ralph lauren.  love love love.  i get my yaya's off in opening ceremony but ralph is where it's at.   this has been the year of weddings.

Kate Middleton to that one guy, Kate Moss to some dude, and now Lauren Bush to David Lauren (who is now -Lauren Bush Lauren, i mean, c'mon).

  I'm just saying, I think Ricky must have eavesdropped on some of my mom's ideas! 

Vogue & Vogue.com have published the story from their Labor Day wedding, but to save you a click, here it is:

One night a year ago this month, Lauren Bush didn’t think it the least bit odd when David Lauren suggested they meet at the Metropolitan Museum of Art to look at some new pictures before attending a holiday dinner nearby. Because they met at the Costume Institute gala in 2004 and have celebrated that anniversary by attending every Met gala since, the museum is one of the couple’s favorite sentimental places. When Lauren arrived at the place where they had agreed to meet, no one was there except David. The artwork he wanted her to see was not the museum’s latest Old Masters acquisition but photographs of the couple that spanned their seven happy years together, blown up and displayed around the room. “I created our own exhibition of our life together,” David says. “And I got down on my knee and proposed. Then we went outside and took a carriage ride with a clarinetist and a saxophonist following us.”

Lauren, 27, and David, 39, were married over the Labor Day weekend at his family’s 17,000-acre Double RL ranch in Ridgway, Colorado, before some 200 guests—intimate by fashion-industry social standards. It was mellow and easy, and that was the couple’s intention in planning a destination wedding instead of marrying in the grand style of New York. “Rustic elegance,” says Lauren, who was born in Colorado and lived there until she was eight, describing the feeling of the wedding. “A beautiful movie,” David adds, “like you were riding across the Old West and you stopped in at a wedding.” With the Rockies and rolling cattle fields, decorating wasn’t a big concern. “You could put out paper plates and confetti, and it would be gorgeous,” Lauren says, smiling, “but we didn’t quite do that.”

It is a month later, and the couple are sitting for an official portrait wearing their wedding-day finest. They have returned from their honeymoon on the Amalfi Coast, and they are back at work: Lauren at FEED Project, which she cofounded four years ago, selling reusable bags to raise funds for organizations such as the World Food Programme (FEED has since provided more than 60 million meals); David heading all digital efforts at his family’s $13 billion fashion-and-lifestyle business. The last time we chatted was in Montauk, New York, before their wedding. No, I wasn’t a Colorado guest, being one of those people who don’t do altitude well—a group, as you may know, that includes the bride’s paternal grandparents, President George H.W. and Barbara Bush. Much to their regret, doctors advised them not to taste the air at the Laurens’ ranch, some 9,000 feet high. Second best, David says, “they sent a wonderful video.” The weekend was not without a president, however. Lauren’s uncle and aunt President George W. and Laura Bush, and their daughters, Barbara and Jenna, were there.

Talk to Lauren and David, and they are as sweet as they are glamorous, as confident as they are sensitive, and polite with not just you but each other. They listen to what the other says before offering their own opinions. They do not tease each other as so many couples do, mistaking complaint for wit and revealing the other’s foibles and outrageousness, comic or otherwise. Her pre-wedding trip was time with a few girlfriends in the countryside outside Montreal. His bachelor party wasn’t a boozy pickling but a relatively restful weekend in Florida, where, as the last unmarried of his closest friends, he was “welcomed into the club of married men, all pretty settled.”

We’re looking at wedding photographs. “Any experience of a girl picking out her wedding dress is amazing,” Lauren says, “but I have to say it was really special to work with David’s dad, to see him in action with his team.” She and Ralph had a few casual conversations at family meals and holiday weekends about what sort of dress she’d like. In late June they met at the Ralph Lauren studio for their first official design meeting. “I walked in, and there were these beautiful illustrations of the looks we’d discussed with my face on them,” she recalls. “It was like a dream come true. We sat together and arrived at this silhouette. It isn’t Victorian exactly. I wanted something modern as well, so there is the high-necked collar and puffed shoulders with the large open back.” Made of richly embellished fabrics, the dress’s top layer is featherweight tulle in antique ivory. Some 100 craftspeople spent more than 3,000 hours hand-embroidering the tulle with delicate motifs of small flowers and Renaissance-era scroll designs in ivory silk and metallic thread, Swarovski Elements crystals, and off-white pearl beads.

Keeping to the Western theme, the bride wore cowboy boots instead of delicate silk mules, as did her five bridesmaids, who were dressed in white linen blouses, vests, and vintage prairie skirts. “They looked like Little House on the Prairie,” says Lauren. Victorian earrings were borrowed from a friend. Her dress and boots were new; the headpiece old; and something blue? Lauren says, laughing, “I wore blue socks.”

Guests coming from the East Coast just missed being grounded by Hurricane Irene. (The majority of guests stayed in hotels in nearby Telluride.) The wedding ceremony was on Sunday, in keeping with Jewish tradition. Although Lauren has not converted to Judaism, she did take instruction, “learning what it means to participate in a Jewish ceremony.” In September, she attended Rosh Hashanah services with her husband and in-laws. “It is important to David.”

As the countdown to the wedding began, the good people of Ridgway circled in and closed ranks, not discussing anything they were helping with, including the construction of a baseball diamond for Saturday-afternoon sports, the Tex-Mex-style rehearsal dinner, or arrangements for the wedding guests to attend the annual Labor Day rodeo at Ridgway’s Ouray County Fairgrounds. The owners of Willowcreek Floral, the local florist, installed a five-foot-tall toy moose at its door and put a closed sign in its windows so no one could snoop. (Still, theDurango Herald reported spotting a Willowcreek truck parked at the ranch early Friday.)

The wedding wasn’t a convergence of boldfaced names, with a few exceptions. The bride’s father, Neil Bush, who attended with his second wife, Maria, tweeted, “Lauren will marry David Lauren a very good man.” Prince Dimitri of Yugoslavia escorted Sharon Bush, the bride’s mother. Both parents stood under the chuppah along with their other children, Ashley and Pierce, joining Ralph and Ricky Lauren with theirs, Andrew and Dylan. After the ceremony, the newlyweds rode down the mountain in an old horse-drawn carriage. “We had ten minutes to ourselves,” David remembers. “The mountains, the blue sky, the fields, the cows . . . it literally was like riding in Heaven.”

The nearly 200-year-old barn where the reception was held was decorated with flowers that were “all white, creams, and blues, and really fragrant,” Lauren says. “Wild roses, lily of the valley, Queen Anne’s lace, and delicate gardenias.” (Her original vision of using wildflowers fell by the wayside after she realized they perish too quickly after picking.) In addition to the Double RL steaks from the ranch, there was a vegetarian offering. (Lauren doesn’t eat meat, and respectfully, David doesn’t either—well, “at least when we’re having a meal together,” he says with a laugh.) The country singer Michael Martin Murphey performed.

I asked if getting married had changed their relationship. “I didn’t know how it would, but it did. The wedding ritual is very solidifying,” Lauren says. Adds David: “In many ways I feel like we already were married for the past seven years, that from the first time we met we had a real connection, but that night we looked at each other and said, ‘We are family now.’ That’s a pretty amazing moment in your life.”