Chelsea Clinton Reveals Her One "Major Act of Rebellion" Against Parents Bill and Hillary

Former first daughter also opens up to Stella McCartney for Harper's Bazaar about the criticism her mother's fashion choices received through the years

Chelsea Clinton was, by all accounts, a good first kid.

Her father Bill Clinton served as president from 1993 to 2001, which coincided with ages 13 to 21 for Chelsea. During these years, Bill and Hillary Clinton's only child graduated from high school and college—with honors!

The now 34-year-old activist went on to attend graduate school, work (for a private consulting fund, her mother's 2008 presidential campaign and The Clinton Foundation), fall in love, get married and have a baby (in proper order, too!) Amazingly, she accomplished all of this without picking up any DUIs, serving time in jail or really doing anything all that bad.

But while interviewing designer Stella McCartney for Harper's Bazaar as part of their 2014 "Women Who Dare" feature, Chelsea confessed her one "major act of rebellion" against her parents—but, spoiler alert, it wasn't all that bad.

First, though, Linda and Paul McCartney's daughter, now 43, wondered, "Why didn't I rebel more?" She reasoned, though, "If you have respect for your parents, then it's quite hard," deciding that ultimately her "slight rebellion was going into fashion and not music or photography or something directly related to what my parents did."

"Mine," Chelsea said, "was to declare that I was a vegetarian. It's kind of sad to say that that was my major act of rebellion." (Funnily enough, Chelsea became a meat-eater as an adult, just a few years after her father famously became a vegan.)

So Chelsea didn't act out, per se, but she did try and take her career in a direction other than the way her political parents went with their own. "I worked in the private sector for years and tried very hard to care about things that were different from what my parents cared about," she said. "But...I just couldn't because of the environment in which I grew up and the examples that my parents set for me."

Eventually, she returned to her roots, taking a job with The Clinton Foundation full-time. She also recalled how, growing up, she'd "watch my mother—who was this very successful lawyer and children's rights advocate—be perceived predominantly through her appearance....Because she was a woman, but also because those surface-level criticisms were more common than thoughtful critiques of her ideas in regard to public education, for example."

"Being aware of that growing up, I did what I thought I could to avoid it," she told Stella in the Harper's Bazaar feature. So in high school, Chelsea said she was "always dressed in these monochromatic navy blue looks because I was trying to avoid any form of criticism."

When her mom ran her presidential campaign on 2008, she "only wore dark pantsuits with different blouses," Chelsea said, "which was a more sophisticated version of the strategy I'd had in high school."

Eventually, though, Chelsea found a fashion aesthetic she was drawn to. "Sometimes I would be criticized," she said of her evolved style, "but that was a more honest way to behave than just always embracing the monochromatic shield."

Wear what you like! Come 2016, pantsuits are going to be all the rage anyway.