15 Weird Facts About Jackie Kennedy’s Secret Style Rules HT
Millions of women across the country spent the 1960s trying to copy what she wore. Designers sold out within days of her being photographed in their work. A single appearance at a state dinner could shift the entire direction of American fashion for the following year. And yet, almost none of them knew the rules behind the look.
She wore fake pearls worth $195 and kept them in a bowl by her front door. She had her hairdresser come to her the morning before the trip to Dallas. She refused to wear the same outfit twice in public, but quietly wore jeans around the house when nobody was watching. She chose her sunglasses, not for style, but to hide where she was looking.
She dressed her children to match her own outfits. And every single pair of shoes she owned, from evening pumps to casual flats, had a secret built into the soul that she never told anyone about. The look that defined an era was not accidental, not effortless, and not as simple as it appeared. Here are 15 weird facts you did not know about Jackie Kennedy’s secret style rules.
Fact one, every pair of shoes she owned had a hidden quarter inch lift. Kathy McKon worked as Jackie Kennedy’s live-in personal assistant from 1964 until 1977, and her job included managing Jackie’s wardrobe. She knew the contents of that closet better than almost anyone alive. And one of the things she noticed, which she did not fully understand until she had worked there for some time, was that every single pair of shoes Jackie owned had a small lift fitted to one heel.
The lift was exactly one quarter of an inch. It appeared on the same heel, the same foot on every pair without exception. Evening pumps, casual walking flats, riding boots, holiday sandals, every pair. The lift compensated for a slight difference in leg length that Jackie had kept entirely private. It was a minor physical asymmetry, the kind that many people have and manage without any particular intervention.
Jackie managed it the way she managed everything, thoroughly, quietly, and in writing. Her personal shopper at Burgdorf Goodman received the same instruction with every shoe order, and the instruction was not to discuss it. McKon described the closet itself in her memoir, Jackie’s Girl, as something she had never seen anything like. Shoes arranged in rows.
Clothing hung by color. Everything maintained in what McKon called immaculate condition. The quarterinch lift was present on every single pair, sitting right there in plain sight once you knew to look for it. Nobody outside the household knew. Nobody who photographed Jackie or reported on her fashion choices knew.
The detail did not emerge publicly until McKenon’s memoir was published in 2017, more than 20 years after Jackie’s death. Fact two, she kept sunglasses in a bowl by her front door as a privacy tool. The oversized sunglasses that became one of Jackie Kennedy’s most recognizable signatures were not simply a fashion choice.
They were a deliberate privacy strategy. She kept multiple pairs in a large bowl near the front door of her Fifth Avenue apartment so that she could grab a pair on the way out every single time without ever having to think about it. The sunglasses went on before she stepped outside, the same way some people put on a coat.
Jackie explained her reasoning on more than one occasion to people close to her. She said the glasses allowed her to watch the world around her without the world seeing where she was looking or what she was feeling. With oversized frames covering most of her face, she could observe what was happening in a room, on a street, at an event without communicating any of that awareness to the people around her.
She could people watch, as she put it, without being seen watching. The irony of the strategy was widely noted by people who knew her. The sunglasses failed completely as a disguise. They did not make her less recognizable. If anything, they made her more so because the oversized dark frames became so associated with her image that spotting the glasses was essentially the same as spotting Jackie Kennedy.
A writer who observed this dynamic noted that it was a disguise in futility because those shades made her instantly recognizable. But the glasses were never really about not being recognized. They were about controlling the emotional information she communicated while being recognized. That was a different thing entirely.
And on that level, they worked. Fact three, her signature pearls were fake and worth less than $200. The triple strand pearl necklace that Jacqueline Kennedy wore throughout her years as first lady and long afterward was not made of real pearls. It was a piece of costume jewelry designed by American jeweler Kenneth J.
Lane made from simulated glass pearls with a rhinestone clasp. When Lane first gave it to her, the retail value of the necklace was $195. Lane was known for what he cheerfully called fabulous fakes. He designed bold theatrical costume jewelry for some of the most photographed women in the world, including Elizabeth Taylor, Audrey Heppern, and the Duchess of Windsor.
And he took the position that the quality of a design mattered far more than the material it was made from. Jackie agreed. She wore the lane pearls constantly in photographs that went around the world at events where genuinely valuable jewelry was common without ever indicating in any way that what was around her neck was not the real thing.
When Jackie died in 1994 and her personal belongings were sold at Sabby’s auction in 1996, the necklace sold for $211,500. The Franklin Mint purchased it for their museum. a piece of costume jewelry worth less than $200 when it was made sold at auction for more than $200,000 because of who had worn it and how she had worn it.
The necklace is now on display at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History. Kenneth J. Lane said that the designer would give pieces to his most photographed client because he thought she would like them and that she always did. Fact four, she designed her entire look as a deliberate political strategy.
When Jacqueline Kennedy sat down with designer Oleg Cassini in November of 1960 to plan her wardrobe for the White House years, the conversation she had with him was not primarily about clothes. It was about image management. Jackie understood with clarity that surprised even the politically experienced people around her.
That what she wore would be read as a message by everyone who saw it. And she intended to control that message completely. She told Cassini that she refused to have JFK’s administration plagued by fashion stories of a sensational nature. She told him she did not want to be the Marie Antuinette of the 1960s. She told him she wanted a scenario, a consistent visual identity that communicated sophistication and youth and America’s confidence on the world stage without veering into extravagance or controversy.
Simple shapes, strong, clean colors. Nothing that competed with her face, nothing that looked like it was trying too hard. The political calculation ran into every detail. She deliberately wore a plain fawn wool coat to JFK’s inauguration, a choice her fashion circle found puzzling at first glance. The reason was straightforward.
Other women on the inaugural platform were wearing fur, and Jackie did not want to invite unfavorable comparisons or appear to be competing with anyone on that day. She wanted to stand out by standing apart, wearing something so deliberately quiet that it drew attention precisely because of its restraint.
Film costume designer Edith Head, who addressed Hollywood royalty for decades, later called the Jackie look the single biggest fashion influence in history. It was the product of a woman who had decided in a hospital bed 2 weeks after giving birth exactly what story she wanted her clothes to tell.
Fact five, she never wore the same outfit twice in public. One of the commitments Jackie Kennedy made publicly at the start of the Kennedy administration was that she would be seen wearing the same outfit more than once. It was part of a broader promise of restraint and modesty in her public presentation made at a time when her clothing bills were already attracting negative attention.
The promise was not kept. Not once. Multiple biographers, including Jay. Randy Tabarelli, documented the fact that Jackie never repeated a public outfit during the White House years, and that this applied even to outfits that had been photographed only once or in limited circulation. The visual consistency of her public image was built not on repetition, but on the coherence of a single aesthetic vision.
Every appearance had a new outfit, and every new outfit was a variation on the same controlled theme. The impression of seeing the same Jackie Kennedy was created by the consistency of the look, not by the reuse of any single garment. The rule applied specifically to public appearances.
In private, the picture was considerably different. Kathy McKon described Jackie around the Fifth Avenue apartment in jeans, casual knit tops, and comfortable clothing that bore no resemblance to the polished public wardrobe. The woman who appeared in photographs was dressed for the photographs. The woman who lived in the apartment wore what was comfortable.
Both were real versions of Jackie Kennedy. Only one was ever seen by the world, and it was the one that never repeated itself. Fact six, she wore three wigs and denied it until her sister-in-law gave her away. During her White House years, Jackie Kennedy’s office issued a flat denial when rumors began circulating that she wore wigs.
The Buffant hairstyle that had become one of her most recognizable signatures was created each time by her hairdresser Kenneth Battel, known professionally as Mr. Kenneth. and the idea that any part of it might be artificial was treated by Jackie’s spokespeople as simply untrue. The denial held until her sister-in-law Joan Kennedy, wife of Senator Ted Kennedy, gave an interview in which she mentioned the subject directly.
Joan told the interviewer that Jackie had talked her into trying a wig and that Jackie herself owned three of them and wore them quite a lot, especially when traveling. The revelation was awkward for Jackie’s office, which had already denied the story. It was also entirely in keeping with the practical problem-solving approach Jackie brought to her appearance.
The buffont required significant maintenance. Traveling internationally on a schedule that left almost no time for hair appointments made the logistics genuinely difficult. Wigs solved the logistics problem quietly and efficiently. In the same way, the quarterin shoe lift solved the leg length problem and the chznong copies solved the French fashion problem. A difficulty presented itself.
She found the most practical solution. She did not discuss it. Mr. Kenneth, who had been given the nickname Secretary of Grooming within the Kennedy White House, was famous for his discretion. He was so trusted by his clients that he reportedly styled both Jackie Kennedy and Marilyn Monroe simultaneously, without either woman knowing the other was his client, and without ever telling either of them a word about it.
Fact seven. Her hairdresser did her hair the morning before the Dallas trip. On the morning of November 21st, 1963, the day before the assassination of President Kennedy, Jackie Kennedy had an appointment with Kenneth Battel. He came to style her hair before the Texas trip as he routinely did before any significant public appearance.
It was an ordinary appointment in an ordinary schedule, the last one he would ever have with her as first lady. According to the account, Battel later gave to reporters. Something unusual happened during that appointment. JFK came in while Battel was working and mentioned that he was trying to decide whether to bring his son John Jr.
to the airport to see them off or to leave the boy with his nanny at the White House. The president seemed genuinely torn. Battel, who by that point had been close to the Kennedy household for nearly a decade, said something direct. He told the president, “To hell with the nanny. Take the boy.” JFK took the advice. John Jr. came to the airport and was photographed there with his parents in what would become one of the last images of the family together.
The detail lodged in Battel’s memory for the rest of his life. He had been styling Jackie Kennedy’s hair for nearly 10 years by that point. He had styled it for the inauguration, for state dinners, for every major public appearance of the Kennedy years. The appointment on November 21st was indistinguishable from any other.
And then the next day happened. Battel died in May of 2013 at the age of 86. Fact eight, she dressed her children to match her own outfits. One of the more charming and less widely discussed aspects of Jackie Kennedy’s style philosophy was the way it extended to her children. Caroline and John Jr. were frequently photographed in outfits that complimented or directly matched what their mother was wearing.
It was not accidental. Jackie managed the children’s public presentation with the same deliberateness she brought to her own Time magazine. in its coverage of Jackie’s fashion legacy specifically noted that her fashion sense extended to her children, which meant Jon and Caroline wore outfits that frequently complimented or matched their mothers.
The photographs from that period show the family as a coordinated visual unit with Jackie in her signature clean lines and solid colors and the children in pieces that were clearly chosen to harmonize with whatever she had on. The practice was consistent with Jackie’s broader approach to visual presentation.
She thought about how things looked together, not just how individual items looked in isolation. Her outfits were designed to be visible from a distance with colors chosen to ensure she stood out in a crowd at the right moments and receded at others. Applying the same thinking to her children meant that the family photographs, which were inevitable and numerous, told a coherent visual story rather than a scattered one.
It was, like most of what Jackie did, both genuinely personal and consciously crafted at the same time. Fact nine. She specifically chose colors to be visible from far away. Oleg Cassini, who designed more than 300 outfits for Jackie during her White House years, later described one of the key principles that guided his work for her.
She needed to be instantly identifiable at a distance. State visits, public appearances, motorcades, and formal events often placed Jackie in vast outdoor spaces or large crowds where the ability to be seen from far away was a practical requirement, not a vanity. The apricot tangent colored silk dress Jackie wore during the Kennedy visit to India in March of 1962 was a direct expression of this principle.
Passini later explained that he had calculated the colors effect specifically for a boat ride through Udapur where Jackie would be seen by people standing on the shore at a significant distance. The apricot silk paired with a matching purse and her signature triple strand pearls was designed to read clearly from the far bank of the lake.
When people standing on shore saw a woman in a luminous apricot dress, they knew without any doubt that it was her. That was the point. The same thinking applied to the strong, clean colors that characterized the Jackie look more broadly. Sky blue, vivid red, ivory, strong yellow. These were colors that translated well to television and newsprint that stood out against ceremonial backgrounds and that were simple enough to be copied at every price point by the women who wanted to dress like her.
Cassini understood that he was not dressing Jackie for a room. He was dressing her for a world that was watching from a distance and every color choice was made with that distance in mind. Fact 10. Her most famous hat was accidentally dented at the inauguration. The pillbox hat became one of the most copied and most recognizable accessories of the 1960s.
Versions of it appeared in fashion houses and department stores and street markets around the world within months of Jackie being photographed in one. It was the centerpiece of the Jackie look in a way that no other single item was. and it got its distinctive shape, at least in part by accident. On inauguration day, January 20th, 1961, the wind gusted as Jackie stood on the outdoor platform during the ceremony.
She reached up and pressed her hand against her head to keep it from blowing off. The pressure of her hand dented the top of the pillbox, pushing it slightly inward. The photographs from that day showed the dented version. And when designers and manufacturers began copying the style in the days and weeks that followed, many of them replicated the dent because they assumed it was intentional.
The dented pillbox became the standard version of the Jackie pillbox, a piece of accidental design influence that spread around the world. Roy Hston Freick, who at the time was Burgdorf Goodman’s headmilliner and who would later become one of the most famous fashion designers in America, known simply as Hston, was credited with creating or significantly refining Jackie’s pillbox hat style.
He described how the inauguration wind incident changed the hat permanently. Jackie herself hated hats as documented in her letters to her personal shopper at Burgdorfs. She wrote that she felt absurd in them and that they wouldize her. The most copied hat of the decade was created for a woman who actively disliked wearing hats, and its most distinctive feature was a crease made by the wind. Fact 11.
Her inauguration coat was chosen to avoid competing with other women’s fur. The coat Jackie Kennedy wore to JFK’s inauguration on January 20th, 1961. Was a beige fawn wool coat with a simple, clean silhouette and large buttons. It was designed by Oleg Cassini. Fashion writers at the time found it surprisingly understated for such a significant occasion.
Several women attending the ceremony were wearing fur coats, which were standard formal winter wear for women of Jackie’s social class in that era. Jackie had worn fur before and would wear it again. The decision to wear wool on inauguration day was deliberate. She had assessed the situation and concluded that competing with other women on the platform in terms of the quality or visibility of their fur would be a distraction from the day’s purpose and potentially invite unfavorable comparisons.
She did not want the conversation after the inauguration to be about whose coat was nicer. She wanted to stand out in a different way through simplicity and youth and restraint and she wanted to do it without appearing to try. The coat worked exactly as intended. It photographed well, read as elegant without being ostentatious, and set her apart from the older women around her in a way that felt natural rather than calculated.
The fact that it was entirely calculated was not something she ever discussed publicly. The logic of the choice only became clear years later when people who had been in her inner circle began talking about how she made decisions. Every element of that day had been thought through. The coat was one of the smaller decisions in a very long list, and she got it right.
Fact 12. Her sister smuggled French dresses into the White House for her. Jackie Kennedy’s commitment to wearing American designers during her White House years was publicly stated and publicly maintained. Her official wardrobe was Oleg Cassini, designed and made in the United States. Whatever her private preferences, the clothing the world saw her in was American.
According to Vanity Fair, which reported the detail in its coverage of Jackie’s fashion legacy, her sister Lee Radzwell smuggled Gioveni dresses into the White House during the Kennedy years, Lee lived in London and had easy access to the Paris fashion houses Jackie had been forced to publicly set aside. The arrangement allowed Jackie to have French couture available to her in private in the residence away from photographers and press attention without technically violating the public commitment to American designers. The
smuggling detail illuminated something that the public record of the Kennedy years consistently obscured. Jackie’s official fashion choices and Jackie’s actual fashion preferences were not the same thing. She had complied with the political requirement that she wear American clothes in public and she had done it gracefully and effectively creating an American fashion moment that influenced designers and consumers for decades.
But in the private rooms of the White House where the cameras did not go, she wore what she actually loved. And what she actually loved was Jivoni. Fact 13. She used headscarves and sunglasses as a paparazzi strategy that always failed. After the assassination of JFK and particularly after her marriage to Aristotle Onases in 1968, Jaclyn Kennedy Onases developed a habit of combining a silk headscarf with her oversized sunglasses whenever she wanted to move through the world with a minimum of attention.
The scarf went over her hair. The glasses went on her face. And together, they created what she apparently believed was a reasonable approximation of being unrecognizable. The strategy did not work. It failed completely and repeatedly and in a way that people close to her noted with some affection. The headscarf and sunglasses combination did not make her look like an anonymous woman going about her day.
It made her look exactly like Jackie Kennedy wearing a headscarf and sunglasses, which was in terms of recognizability, essentially identical to just being Jackie Kennedy. Fashion writers who documented her post-w style noted that the scarf was her stealth accessory, glamorous and a little mysterious, and undeniably practical, but undeniably hers.
What the headscarf and the sunglasses did accomplish, even if they failed as a disguise, was to create a visual barrier between her face and the cameras. They prevented photographers from capturing clear images of her expressions and her eyes. They made photographs taken without her consent harder to use because the emotional content of an image is carried largely by the eyes and the expression around them and hers were consistently hidden.
The privacy strategy failed on one level and succeeded on another. She kept wearing both the scarves and the sunglasses until the end of her life. Fact 14. She dressed differently for every country she visited based on specific research. When Jacqueline Kennedy traveled abroad on official visits, she did not simply pack her standard wardrobe and arrive.
She researched the visual culture of the country she was visiting and made deliberate adjustments to what she wore in acknowledgement of local customs, aesthetics, and expectations. The research was careful and the adjustments were meaningful, not token. During the Kennedy visit to India in March of 1962, Jackie wore colors that reflected the Indian love of vibrant saturated hues.
The apricot silk dress, the pale yellow ensemble she wore in other settings on the same trip, the accessories she chose, all reflected an awareness of the visual context she was moving through. She was not dressing for American cameras on that trip. She was dressing for an Indian audience and the distinction was visible in every photograph.
When she traveled to Pakistan on the same trip, she adjusted again with clothing choices that were more modest in silhouette and more aligned with the aesthetic expectations of that cultural context. When she visited France, she wore pieces that acknowledged French taste without simply copying it. The pattern was consistent across different visits and different countries.
Jackie understood that what she wore communicated respect or the absence of it. And she chose respect consistently, not because anyone required it of her, but because she had decided it was the right way to represent the country she was traveling on behalf of. Fact 15. The Gucci bag named after her was not something she ever officially endorsed.
The Gucci bag that the world knows as the Jackie bag has been associated with Jaclyn Kennedy Onasses for more than 50 years. It appears in photographs of her from the late 1960s and early 1970s worn on her arm on the streets of Manhattan boarding planes and going about the daily life she was conducting in the years after JFK’s death. Gucci named it after her.
It remains in production today, regularly updated and reissued and still called the Jackie. What Jackie Kennedy herself thought about this arrangement has never been fully documented. She did not officially endorse the bag, sign a licensing agreement, or make any public statement celebrating the association.
She wore it because she liked it, in the same way she wore her sunglasses and her headscarves because they worked for the life she was living. The naming happened around the bag rather than through her, a reflection of how pervasive her influence had become. The Gucci Jackie was originally called the 50s constants when it was introduced in the 1950s.
It was redesigned in the late 1960s as a simpler, more casual hobo style bag with a distinctive half moon shape and a single strap. Jackie was photographed with it so frequently and so consistently throughout the early 1970s that the bag became inseparable from her image in that period, and Gucci renamed it accordingly.
A woman who had spent her entire adult life carefully managing what was associated with her name and image had a product named after her without her direct involvement. And it became one of the most enduring pieces of fashion merchandise in the world. It was in its quiet way the perfect final expression of a style philosophy she had never been able to fully control.
The look took on a life of its own, as it always had, and the world claimed it as its own, as it always did. Jackie Kennedy built one of the most recognizable personal styles in history out of a combination of political strategy, physical problem solving, deliberate restraint, and the kind of meticulous attention to detail that she brought to every part of her life.
The look was not accidental. The pearls were fake. The hat was dented by the wind. The shoes had a secret in the soul. The sunglasses were armor. And somewhere in her Fifth Avenue apartment, in a bowl by the front door, a dozen pairs of oversized dark frames were always waiting for the next time she had to go outside and face the world.
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