It was “Cheesy Listening” night at the Zodiac club in Oxford, and all the Sloanes were there. The Sloanes—so named for their resemblance to an affected set in London in the 80s—are the girls who run the Oxford University social scene, or at least think they do, because they are pretty and blonde and have families with vacation homes in places like Ibiza, which they pronounce “Ih-bee-tha.” They can easily be spotted by their pink pashminas.

There was another girl there that night—this was the fall of 2001, just after classes had begun for the year. The girl was not blonde, but her parents were two of the most powerful people in the world. She stood on the sideline watching her new classmates dance. It was a position she was unused to. She had spent most of her life at the center of things. She was Chelsea Clinton, and she wanted to get out on the dance floor.

She loved to dance. As a child, she had performed in The Nutcrackerwith the Washington School of Ballet. A wire service had declared her performance “graceful”; a president had sat in the audience, cheering her on. In North Africa, on a state visit, accompanying a First Lady, she had danced with the Bedouins, and a national magazine had commented on her spirited “leaping and shimmying.”

But here in Oxford the students seemed to be taking perverse delight in simply ignoring her, or maybe it was the presence of the two Secret Service men, posted nearby, that dissuaded anyone from asking her to go for a whirl. She watched as the Sloanes and their dates boogied down to the sounds of “Lady Marmalade” and “Stayin’ Alive.” American music, her music.

And then Chelsea decided to take matters into her own hands. She spotted a handsome boy in the crowd and let one of her guards know she would like to dance with him. The Secret Service man dutifully approached the boy, and Chelsea danced.

“It was a bit odd,” one of the boy’s friends said later, “because it was so sort of ‘Your presence is requested’ kind of thing . . . as if he were being taken in front of the Queen.”

In the months since that lonely night in Oxford, Chelsea Clinton has indeed emerged as a kind of queen—a media queen. She was once known as a plain, studious girl given to wearing slogan T-shirts (DON’T LET THE FUTURE HAPPEN WITHOUT YOU was a favorite), but now her public image has been treated to the sort of glamour infusion publicists only dream about while delirious with fever.

The crowning moment came in January, when Chelsea turned up sitting in the front row of a Donatella Versace couture show in Paris next to Gwyneth Paltrow and Madonna—the unlikeliest paparazzi shot to come along in years. Her usual Banana Republic cast aside for a black Versace pantsuit, Chelsea was beautiful. Her curly hair had been straightened in a Versace-masterminded pageboy almost universally deemed to be transforming. “I am a bit dazzled by it all,” Chelsea said, in between attempts to share observations with Paltrow.

But if the glare of the spotlight bothered her, Chelsea didn’t let on. In March, she jetted to Milan for Versace’s ready-to-wear show, this time hobnobbing with Heather Graham. As she sat watching the models, Chelsea’s hand rested on the thigh of her boyfriend, a mop-headed American Rhodes scholar at Oxford named Ian Klaus. The couple’s “dirty dancing” antics at the after-party prompted the New York Daily News to remark, “Chelsea Clinton has inherited her father’s lust gene.”

“The press is still all over me in London, but on the Continent I can do what I want,” Chelsea told Woman’s Wear Daily. Since then, the passionate pair’s P.D.A.’s have become shark bait for tabloids all over the world. “I’ve been very good to you,” Chelsea recently told a busy Oxford paparazzo named Clive Postlethwaite, playfully slapping his hand. “I try not to thrust Ian into the limelight,” Chelsea told reporters at the London premiere of The Shipping News, going on to say she would have preferred to be in Oxford, studying, but she felt she had to come “because of Kevin”—Spacey. The British papers have faithfully covered Chelsea’s nearly weekly outings in the company of celebrities such as Paul McCartney and his fiancée, Heather Mills, Bianca Jagger, and model Sophie Dahl. Chelsea has been taken under the wing of society mavens Sally Greene, head of the Old Vic theater, and Nicky Haslam, a sexagenarian man-about-town known for his spiky hair and leather pants. Tatler magazine voted Chelsea the fifth-most-eligible young woman in Britain, while the British men’s magazine FHM ranked her one of the 50 most eligible in the world, along with Oprah Winfrey.