Prince William and kate fashion! - A Star Turn for a Lady-in-Waiting

SHE has uttered barely a word in public and given precisely one interview, in which she divulged that a party she had organized had an Ibiza theme and “really good music.” Yet the moment she appeared in her slinky Alexander McQueen bridesmaid’s sheath at the royal wedding last month, Pippa Middleton, the bride’s little sister, became a global phenomenon.

Hers was the rear that launched a thousand blogs. “Pip Pippa Hooray!” wrote the Daily Star. “Her Royal Hotness,” the Daily Mail christened her. Swooning Twitter users from both sides of the Atlantic made her a trending topic. Someone started a Facebook group devoted to appreciating the Pippa posterior (it now has more than 160,000 members).

Not since Elizabeth Hurley stepped out with Hugh Grant at the premiere of “Four Weddings and a Funeral” in 1994, wearing a dress held together by a prayer and some safety pins, has a single garment achieved so much for someone supposedly playing a supporting role in someone else’s big moment.

And now the world wants to hear about Pippa. How old is she? (27). Is she unattached? (No, she has a boyfriend, Alex Loudon, a hunky Old Etonian businessman.) So she’s totally unavailable? (Unclear; she is not engaged, as far as anyone knows.) Does that mean that she got together with Prince Harry during the reception? (No.)

The attention of the restless, hungry British news media has already shifted. Kate Middleton, now Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge, is being demoted by the tabloids from Hot Engaged Babe to Married Woman Who We Wonder if She Is Pregnant. Meanwhile, Pippa gets the saucier role: Foxy Unmarried Woman Who We Wonder Who She Is Sleeping With.

For now at least, everything she wears, every place she goes, every man she dates will be scrutinized every which way by hordes of eager celebrity watchers.

“Every magazine in the Western world now wants her on the cover,” said Kate Reardon, editor of the society magazine Tatler. “She will be having job offers hurled at her. How she exploits these opportunities is going to be very much up to her. There are many people in her situation who, within weeks, would be falling out of nightclubs and hanging out with celebrities, and getting a huge head about all this.”

Judging from past behavior, it seems unlikely that Pippa will become overly celebritized. She has been in the public eye ever since her sister began dating Prince William, but has maintained a silence that would impress the Sphinx.

Extremely slender, smiley and perma-tanned, Pippa has often been spotted out and about wearing form-fitting jersey dresses, her hair glossy. She likes a good party and a hot new nightclub and has been a persistent paparazzi favorite.

But like her sister, she has somehow always managed in photographs to exude a kind of serene delight, creating the impression that whatever she is doing, it is harmless, expensive, exclusive fun. Even a photo that leaked this week, showing her dancing in a bra and skirt with a man wearing only his boxer shorts, seems tame in comparison to past royal-family indiscretions. (Remember Harry in that swastika armband?)

Pippa, real name Philippa, is the second of the three Middleton children (the youngest, James, was the one who read from the Bible in such ponderous Pinterian tones during the wedding service). She grew up in Berkshire and, like her sister, went to Marlborough College, a boarding school in Wiltshire.

She attended the University of Edinburgh (her sister went to the University of St. Andrews), where she studied English literature and, according to the British newspapers, found boyfriends from among a large pool of well-heeled schoolmates.

When she graduated, she moved in with her sister in a house in Chelsea their parents bought for them; the two were often photographed at the same parties with the same crowd of royal-approved friends. The tabloids called Pippa the foxier, livelier of the pair. In 2008, Tatler magazine praised her looks, her vivacity and her good connections to declare her its No. 1 Society Singleton for the year.

Her jobs have included starting Party Times — a Web site devoted to children’s parties — for her parents’ party business, and working for a London events planner. She is said to be hyper-organized, to have taken charge of many details of the royal wedding and late-night reception, and to be a close and supportive sister, despite the tabloid convention that in any pairing of similarly aged women, one is invariably trying to outshine, upstage or outmaneuver the other.

Over the years, there have been catty murmurings. Someone once apparently dubbed the Middletons the Wisteria Sisters, meaning that they were “highly decorative, terribly fragrant and terrific (social) climbers,” explained the Daily Express. Others, citing her supposed affinity for friends with money and titles, spoke snobbishly of Pippa’s social “ambition,” British code for the verboten practice of trying to rise above oneself.

Last week, several old photographs of Pippa wearing various humorous outfits, including a dress made of toilet paper, surfaced in the newspapers. But as has happened with the whole family, Pippa’s friends have generally closed ranks around her, freezing out the news media even as she and her parents have avoided publicly trading on their royal connections.