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Shinan Govani is a columnist with Hello! Canada magazine.

Nineteen years ago this month, the most Eligible Man in the World made it official on Cumberland Island, the largest and most remote of Georgia's barrier islands. Eighteen miles long and three miles wide, the island has no grocery store, and only sparing electricity. The priest, conducting the intimate, candle-lit ceremony inside a white clapboard church – built originally by slaves in the 1830s – used a flashlight.

The most enduring detail from these lost-to-time nuptials, however? Shockingly, they went down entirely in secret, only to be revealed to a panting press afterword. John F. Kennedy Jr, the groom, had clearly inherited his mother's ability to play the media like a harp, and outwit them like a fox.

Skip to 2014: With a PR plan of attack that was more peek-a-boo, here we were again: the most Eligible Man in the World making it official.

Different island, though. More of a floating city. And the Aman palazzo, set on the Grand Canal in Venice... well, emphatically more Caravaggio chi-chi than shabby chic. As far as celebrity epochs go, George Clooney's I-do was a Halley's Comet of an event: we weren't really sure we were going to see this moment in our lifetime.

Kids, watch this: the 53-year-old two-Oscar winner, who'd long managed the high-wire act of being Hollywood's senior statesman and living his personal life like some sort of Rat Pack-era roué (often dating women "below the stairs," as it were) tied the knot at sundown, Saturday, to Amal Alamuddin, the above-our-pay-grade human-rights lawyer with Princess Jasmine looks, in front of a throng that included Bono, Bill Murray, Cindy Crawford, Matt Damon, and Anna Wintour.

After all was said, and all gondolas glided, another significant volte-face had been achieved, I gather – a revolution of sorts in Trophy Wife-ism.

Out was the prototype where she is little more than a bauble, a relic of a time when the most alpha of men generally gravitated to women who were the perfect hostess, or excelled at looking spectacular, or were just educated enough to be suitable marriage material. In, instead: a marital template in which one's bride has real accomplishments, and perhaps even more cranial horsepower than you, as manifested by this Oxford-educated goddess who is an esteemed figure in human rights law, one who's served as an advisor to United Nations Secretary-general Kofi Annan and clerked for U.S. Supreme Court judge Sonia Sotomayor, and, moreover, has represented clients ranging from Julian Assange to the state of Cambodia. Needless to say, the Beirut-born Ms. Amal is fluent in French, English, Arabic, and perfect.

"I'm trading up." So, cannily summed up Mr. Clooney, sometime after their whirlwind engagement.

Holding Ms. Alamuddin up to the spectre of Carolyn Bessette – JFK Jr's deal-closer – is particularly illuminating. While the former most certainly does not lack in the style department – her brows alone are blog-worthy – Ms. Bessette's aloof brand of beauty is the main thing that distinguished her, and still puts her in the pantheon of icons. Famously, her gig at the time of her acquaintance with Mr. Kennedy consisted of working in PR for Calvin Klein, one of those "lite jobs" that have lured many such women, going back to the landscape that Anita Loos famously wrote about in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. (Working in a gallery, or interning at Conde Nast: those are the other glitter-girl starter-jobs).

Even in the context of Prince William and Kate Middleton – though, unlike JFK Jr. and Clooney, there was little doubt that Wills would marry – it's interesting indeed, lining up Ms. Alamuddin next to the current Duchess of Cambridge, whose resume, lest we forget, includes the high point that was her stint as accessories buyer at a High Street clothier.

In terms of the semiotics of Trophy Wives, even power women such as Hillary Clinton and Diane von Furstenberg inevitably derived their initial platforms from their husbands. And, so, a "Full Package" like the new Mrs. Clooney is striking enough that one website even posted this cheeky headline, in a post about the wedding, over the weekend: "Internationally Acclaimed Barrister Amal Alamuddin Marries An Actor."

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