Wedding Dresses of American “Royalty”

Luci Baines Johnson

When Johnson married Air National Guardsman Patrick Nugent on August 6, 1966, before some 700 guests and 55 million television viewers, it was a wedding to which “nobody [was] invited except the immediate country,” a comedian quipped. So it’s not surprising that she set a trend with her A-line taffeta Priscilla of Boston gown, which featured a nine-foot-long Watteau court train that fell from between her shoulder blades. Three years later, her sister, Lynda Byrd, would wed in the East Room wearing a high-necked white silk-satin Empire sheath by Geoffrey Beene.