15 Weird Facts About Jackie Kennedy’s Shopping Habits HT

She was the most watched woman in America and she dressed the part every single day. But what the public never knew was that her husband was furious about the Bills, that her most iconic outfit was a knockoff bought to avoid a political scandal. That she once spent $1,250,000 on clothes in a single year.

That she resold her designer gowns to a consignment shop and pocketed the cash behind her second husband’s back. That her wedding dress was destroyed 10 days before the ceremony. completely remade in secret and she never knew about it until years later. And that the most famous garment she ever wore, the pink suit she had on when President Kennedy was assassinated, is locked in a sealed vault in Maryland, where it will remain unwashed and unseen until the year 203.

Here are 15 weird facts you did not know about Jackie Kennedy’s shopping habits. Fact one, JFK complained about her clothing bills constantly. From the very beginning of their marriage, John F. Kennedy had one consistent recurring complaint about his wife. The money she spent on clothes, it was not a small complaint, and it was not an occasional one.

According to Mary Belli Gallagher, who served as Jackie’s personal secretary both during and after the White House years, and who later published a memoir about the experience, the tension over Jackie shopping bills, was a regular feature of their private life together. Jackie spent approximately $30,000 a year on clothing during JFK’s Senate years, a figure that was reported by the New York Times and caused a minor public embarrassment during the 1960 presidential campaign.

When a reporter asked Jackie about the story, she made a remark that her own circle acknowledged was not her finest moment in public relations. She said she could not possibly have spent that much unless she wore sable underwear. It was witty, but it confirmed rather than denied the underlying impression that she spent lavishly on herself.

Once in the White House, the spending increased significantly. Biographers have documented that her wardrobe bill for 1962 alone exceeded $150,000. To put that in context, JFK’s annual salary as president of the United States was $100,000. His wife’s clothing expenditure in a single year was $50,000 more than he earned.

He was, by all accounts, not pleased about this. Gallagher described in her memoir multiple occasions when JFK called her directly, asking her to pull together Jackie’s bills so he could confront her about them. He was not passive about the issue. He raised it, argued about it, and then watched as Jackie went right on spending.

Jackie had grown up surrounded by wealth and the expectation that her appearance would be maintained to the highest possible standard, and no amount of presidential frustration was going to change the way she had been raised to think about clothes. The tension was never fully resolved. It was simply managed.

Jackie found ways to charge purchases under other people’s names to obscure the full picture of her spending, a habit documented in auction records that later came to light. JFK complained, “The bills kept coming. It was in the grand scheme of their complicated marriage. One of the more consistent and reliably ordinary domestic disputes the Kennedy household produced.

Fact two,” she charged purchases under other people’s names to hide the spending. One of the more revealing documents to emerge from the Jackie Kennedy historical record is a collection of receipts from Saks Fth Avenue dated April of 1961 that were auctioned through University Archives in Westport, Connecticut.

The receipts documented purchases of multiple items of clothing including dresses, a navy dot suit, a red coat, two black evening dresses, and a white evening dress. What made the receipts unusual was who they were charged to. Every item on those receipts was build not to Mrs. John F. Kennedy, but to Mrs.

Fred Drake, the wife of a Harper’s Bizaarre editor. A handwritten note included with the receipts written by Jackie’s personal secretary, Mary Gallagher, on White House memo paper, listed the stores from which Jackie had made purchases and included a notation that read, “For Mrs. K, ordered in my name.

” The receipts and note had been addressed to Thomas Walsh, the Kennedy family financial adviser, care of Joseph P. Kennedy, JFK’s father. The practice of charging purchases under other people’s names was a deliberate strategy to prevent the full picture of her spending from being easily traceable.

If everything was built to Jackie Kennedy, it would be simple for anyone reviewing the household accounts to calculate exactly how much she was spending on clothes at any given time. Dispersing the charges across multiple names made the total harder to see at a glance. It also presumably made it harder for JFK to confront her with a specific number when he was angry about the bills.

This was not an isolated incident. Gallagher’s memoir described a broader pattern in which Jackie shopping was managed in ways that were designed to obscure its full scale. She was not doing this carelessly or without awareness. She understood exactly what the numbers looked like, and she took deliberate steps to manage how much of the picture was visible at any one time.

The receipts that ended up at auction came from Gallagher’s personal records, which she retained after leaving Jackie’s employee. They provided a rare unfiltered look at the mechanics of how the first lady’s spending was actually handled well away from the carefully managed public image of a woman who claimed in the press that she could not possibly have spent $30,000 a year on clothes.

Fact three, she had a personal shopper at Burgdorf Goodman and wrote her detailed orders by hand. Jackie Kennedy’s primary point of contact for accessories during the White House years was a woman named Marita Okconor who worked in the millinary department at Burgdorf Goodman on Fifth Avenue in New York.

Okconor functioned as Jackie’s personal shopper and the two communicated through a series of handwritten letters that have since become collector’s items. 17 of those letters were auctioned through John McKinnus auctioneers in Massachusetts in November of 2013, drawing significant attention from both fashion historians and Kennedy collectors.

The letters revealed something that photographs and public appearances had never fully communicated. The extraordinary precision with which Jackie approached the construction of her own image. She did not simply call Burgdorfs and ask them to send over some nice hats. She wrote detailed instructions. She included sketches.

She tore pictures out of magazines and newspapers and attached fabric swatches from the outfits Oleg Cassini was making for her, sending them to Okconor so that accessories could be found to match exactly. One of the most quoted letters contained a shoe request so specific that it read almost like an engineering specification.

Jackie wrote that she needed a pair of alligator shoes in size 10A with a medium heel, slender, pointed toe, but not exaggerated, and that she did not want what she called tricky vamp business. She specified that she usually purchased Italian shoes at a shop called Eugenia of Florence, and that Okconor would therefore know the style she meant.

She described what she wanted as elegant and timeless, and she added that the shoes absolutely had to be ready in time for inauguration day, so Okconor would need to rush. The letters also revealed a more personal side of Jackie’s relationship with her own public image. In one note, she wrote about hats with obvious frustration.

Oh dear, it was so pleasant when I did not have to wear hats. They willize me and I still feel absurd in them. In another letter, she declared that hats were actually the most important thing she needed Okconor<unk>’s help with. A complete reversal of her previous position delivered without any acknowledgement that she had just said the opposite.

She knew what she needed, even when she was not happy about needing it. When a pair of shoes O’Conor had sent did not meet her standards, Jackie returned them with a note explaining precisely what was wrong. “They have that vamp, which I do not like,” she wrote. “No ambiguity, no softening of the critique.

She knew exactly what she wanted, and she was willing to send things back until she got it.” Fact four, her iconic pink suit was a knockoff bought to avoid a political scandal. The pink suit Jaclyn Kennedy wore on November 22nd, 1963, the day of President Kennedy’s assassination in Dallas, Texas, is possibly the most recognizable single garment in American political history.

It is almost universally described as a Chanel suit. It was not technically a Chanel suit. It was a carefully authorized copy made by a New York dress salon called Chznon. And the reason Jackie bought it there instead of directly from Chanel in Paris tells a story about the political pressures shaping her shopping decisions from the very beginning.

When JFK launched his presidential campaign in 1960, Jackie’s preference for French couture became a liability. She loved Givveni, Chanel, Balenciaga, and Dior. She had studied in Paris in 1949 and had deep affection for French fashion. But as the wife of a candidate seeking votes from American workers and manufacturers, wearing clothes made in France was a political problem.

She was criticized publicly for unamerican fashion choices. And JFK’s father, Joseph Kennedy, Senior, made clear that this had to change. The solution was Chz Non. A Park Avenue dress salon owned by two women named Nona Park and Sophie Shaunard. CHZ Nino had a special arrangement with several French couture houses including Chanel under what was known as a line-for-line copy system.

Chanel would send fabric, buttons, trim, and detailed design specifications to Sznon, which would then recreate the garment in New York using the original materials. The result looked identical to the Paris original, was made from the same materials and cost approximately the same amount.

The only difference was that it carried an American address. The pink suit from Chanel’s 1961 autumn and winter collection was made this way. The fabric was wool clay shipped from Paris. The buttons, the navy trim, and all other materials came directly from Chanel. It was assembled and fitted at Chznol on Park Avenue.

Jackie wore it at least six times before Dallas, including during the couple’s visit to London in March of 1962, and during the visit of the Maharaja of Jaipur to Washington in October of that same year. JFK reportedly loved it and specifically asked her to wear it on the Texas trip. The suit that would become the defining image of one of the most devastating days in American history was at its core a political workaround designed to let Jackie have French fashion without appearing to be buying French fashion.

The suit was never cleaned after the assassination. It arrived at the National Archives sometime before July of 1964, accompanied by a note written on the personal stationary of Janet Aenclauss, Jackie’s mother. The note read simply, “Jackie sued in bag, worn November 22nd, 1963.” In 2003, Caroline Kennedy signed a deed transferring legal ownership to the archives, and requesting that the suit not be made available for public viewing until at least 100 years from that date, meaning not before the year 203. It sits today in an acid-free container in a windowless room, unfolded and shielded from light, exactly as it was when it came off Jackie’s body the morning after the assassination. Fact five. She was forced to switch to an American designer she did not know. When Jackie Kennedy began building the wardrobe she would need as first lady, she was by her own account at something of a disadvantage. She had relied for years on French designers, particularly

Jiivanchi, and she was now required for political reasons to wear clothing made in America. The problem was that she did not have a deep familiarity with American designers, and she needed to find one quickly. She was in the hospital, having just given birth to John Jr.

by Cesarian section, when the search began in earnest. Her father-in-law, Joseph Kennedy, Senior, who understood the power of image with the thoroughess of a former Hollywood figure, placed an urgent call to Ole Cassini, a Russian-born American naturalized fashion designer who had built his career in Hollywood and New York.

Cassini was 47 years old, had dressed some of the biggest stars in the entertainment world, and had a long personal friendship with the Kennedy family. He came to the hospital and found Jackie in bed surrounded by sketches sent over by fashion columnist Diana Veland from a variety of American designers. None of them were quite right.

Cassini looked at the sketches and at Jackie and proposed a different approach entirely. He told her he was not going to design clothes for her as a politician’s wife. He was going to dress her as though she were the star of a major film because that was what the role of first lady actually demanded. He visualized her as an American queen.

He told her she needed a scenario, a consistent visual identity that would read clearly from a distance in photographs and on television. Clean lines, strong colors, simple silhouettes, nothing that would compete with her face. Jackie was persuaded. She appointed Cassini as her exclusive couture for the White House years, giving him the title secretary of style.

And over the next three years, he designed more than 300 outfits for her. The collaboration produced what fashion historians have called the Jackie look, a term coined almost immediately as the style was copied by women across the country and around the world. Film costume designer Edith Head, one of the most celebrated people in the history of Hollywood fashion, described the Jackie look as the single biggest fashion influence in history.

The transition from French Coutu to Cassini was not entirely clean. According to Vanity Fair, Jackie’s sister Lee Radzy will smuggled Givveni dresses into the White House for Jackie during the Kennedy years. Jackie continued to admire and apparently to wear French designs in private, but the official record was Cassini, all-American for all 1,000 days. Fact six.

She sent Cassini letters demanding that no two women wear the same dress. Jackie Kennedy’s letters to Oleg Cassini, many of which are preserved at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library in Boston revealed the level of control she exercised over every aspect of her wardrobe. She was not a passive client who received whatever her designer produced and wore it graciously.

She was an active collaborator who knew exactly what she wanted, communicated it in writing with great specificity, and held Cassini to strict standards. One of the most frequently quoted lines from her correspondence with Cassini appeared in a letter she wrote to him on December 13th, 1960 before she had even moved into the White House.

She told him, “Just make sure no one has exactly the same dress I do. I want all mine to be original and no fat little women hopping around in the same dress.” The instruction was clear. Her clothes were to be exclusive. If Cassini sold similar designs to other clients, she would not wear them.

The first lady’s wardrobe was to be by definition one of a kind. In the same correspondence, Jackie told Cassini something that revealed how carefully she had thought through the political and visual dimensions of her role. She wrote that she refused to have JFK’s administration plagued by fashion stories of a sensational nature.

She did not want to be the Marie Antuinette of the 1960s. A reference that reflected her genuine awareness that her spending and her taste for luxury could become a political liability for her husband if they were not managed correctly. She was asking Cassini to help her be glamorous without being controversial.

To create a look that was sophisticated enough to represent America on the world stage, but restrained enough that it did not give her critics ammunition. She also gave Cassini detailed aesthetic direction that went far beyond simple color and fabric preferences. She told him she wanted clothes that were like those Audrey Heppern wore in that she wanted simplicity and a certain sportiness combined with sophistication.

She sent him pictures torn from magazines of looks she admired, including a photograph of Heepburn wearing a yellow sari inspired gown designed by Gioveni, and asked him to create his own interpretation. The resulting dress became one of the most photographed of her first lady years. Cassini later described the collaboration as unlike anything he had experienced with any other client.

He addressed Hollywood stars, socialites, and international figures of every kind. None of them came close to Jackie Kennedy in terms of the thought and intention they brought to their own image. He told an interviewer that all he could remember about those years were nerves.

And Jackie on the phone saying, “Hurry, hurry, Oleg. I have got nothing to wear.” Fact seven. She publicly denied the scale of her spending, then quietly kept spending. The gap between what Jackie Kennedy said about her spending and what she actually spent was one of the more consistent and well doumented features of her public and private life.

She was aware that the numbers were politically damaging. She managed them strategically. She did not stop spending. When the New York Times reported in 1960 that she spent $30,000 a year on her wardrobe, she responded with the Sable underwear quip, which was widely quoted, but which satisfied nobody who had been doing the arithmetic.

The actual figure for her White House years was substantially higher. Her wardrobe bill for 1962 alone has been documented at over $150,000, more than $50,000 more than the president’s salary for 1961. Estimates based on contemporary accounts place the figure at approximately $40,000. Though that number has been disputed by some historians as understated.

The social secretary letter that was sent to Women’s Wear Daily on Jackie’s behalf in January of 1961 made a public commitment that Jackie’s clothes would be made by Cassini would be designed and made in America and that she would be seen wearing the same outfit more than once. The last promise was never kept.

Multiple biographers and people who knew her wardrobe described Jackie as someone who never wore the same outfit twice, a habit that was entirely inconsistent with the stated promise of restraint. Her response to public scrutiny about her fashion spending was to get better at managing the information rather than to reduce the spending.

She instructed her staff to charge purchases under other names. She communicated with her personal shopper through handwritten letters rather than through official channels that might be subject to scrutiny. She maintained the public-f facing narrative of a responsible first lady who was wearing American designs and avoiding extravagance.

While the actual bills told a different story entirely, it was a strategy consistent with how she managed other sensitive areas of her life. She understood very clearly that the appearance of something and the reality of it were separate things and she put considerable effort into managing both simultaneously.

The shopping was no different from anything else. The public saw what she wanted the public to see. The bills went somewhere else. Fact eight. Her shoes had a secret built into every single pair. Kathy McKon, who worked as Jackie Kennedy’s personal assistant and lived with the family in their Fifth Avenue apartment from 1964 to 1977, was responsible, among other things, for maintaining Jackie’s wardrobe.

This meant she had an intimate familiarity with Jackie’s closet that very few people in the world could claim. And it was through that familiarity that McKan noticed something unusual about every single pair of shoes Jackie owned. Every pair without exception had a/4in lift affixed to one heel. The lift was small enough that it was not visible unless you were looking for it.

And most people who interacted with Jackie had no particular reason to examine the soles of her shoes closely. But once you knew it was there, it was hard to miss. McKon described the discovery in her memoir, Jackie’s Girl, My Life with the Kennedy Family, which was published in 2017, and the detail quickly became one of the most widely shared revelations from the book.

The lift compensated for the fact that one of Jackie’s legs was slightly shorter than the other. It was a minor physical asymmetry, the kind that is actually fairly common and that most people manage without any special accommodation. Jackie managed it with characteristic thoroughess. If every pair of shoes she owned needed a quarterin lift on one heel, then every pair of shoes she owned was going to have one.

Whether it was a formal evening pump, a casual flat, or a practical walking shoe, McKon described the closet itself with undisguised amazement. She had never seen anything like it. The walk-in closet was jammed with clothing arranged by color. The shoe collection was extraordinary. London look boots, pumps in every color, spotless sneakers for morning jogs around the reservoir, and all of them sharing the same small secret built into the sole.

The detail added something to the picture of Jackie Kennedy that photographs never captured. The private, practical dimension of a woman who maintained a flawless exterior through an enormous amount of quiet, methodical work. Jackie herself never publicly mentioned the lift. It was not the kind of detail she would have wanted widely known.

The public image of the first lady was one of effortless grace and perfect proportion. And the reality, as McKan’s account made clear, was that the perfection was maintained through exactly the kind of careful, visible preparation that Jackie brought to everything she did. The shoes looked right because she made sure they would look right. That was always the point.

Fact nine, her wedding dress was destroyed and secretly remade in 10 days. On September 12th, 1953, Jacquellyn Lee Bouvier married Senator John F. Kennedy in Newport, Rhode Island. The wedding was one of the most photographed and widely covered social events of the year. Approximately 1,000 guests attended.

Crowds estimated at 2,000 people filled the street outside the church. Pictures of Jackie in her ivory silk taffida gown appeared in newspapers and magazines across the country. The dress was widely admired and became one of the most iconic wedding gowns in American history. Almost nobody knew that the dress Jackie wore that day was not the original dress.

The original had been destroyed 10 days before the ceremony, and the one she walked down the aisle in was a complete recreation built from scratch in a matter of days by a woman named Annlow and her team working around the clock at their own expense without ever telling the bride. Annlo was an African-American fashion designer who had been making gowns for the wealthiest families in America since the 1920s.

She was described in the Saturday Evening Post as society’s bestkept secret. She had spent 8 weeks making Jackie’s wedding gown and 10 bridesmaid’s dresses when a pipe burst in her workroom and flooded the space. The water destroyed everything. The original gown, which required 50 yards of ivory silk taffida and had been constructed using a specialized sewing technique that created a three-dimensional effect of ruffles and concentric circles, was gone.

So were the 10 bridesmaid’s dresses. Lo did not call the Kennedys. She did not ask for compensation or additional time or any acknowledgement of what had happened. She called her team together, ordered replacement materials, and started over. The recreation was completed in approximately 10 days with Lo and her assistants working through the night on multiple occasions.

The additional cost of materials and labor came entirely out of Lo’s own pocket, a loss estimated at approximately $2,200, which in 1953 represented a significant sum for a small fashion business. Lo received no public credit for the work. The wedding was exhaustively documented in the press with detailed descriptions of the food, the guest list, the number of tears on the wedding cake, and the fabric and silhouette of the gown.

The designer’s name appeared nowhere. It was not until after JFK’s assassination in 1963 that Lo began to receive any public acknowledgement for creating one of the most famous wedding dresses in American history. Many historians now believe that the anonymous benefactor who paid off Lowe’s tax debt to the IRS in 1962, allowing her to continue working when she would otherwise have been forced to close, was Jacqueline Kennedy.

This has never been officially confirmed. Fact 10. She spent $1.25 million on clothes in the first year of her second marriage. When Jacqueline Kennedy married Greek shipping magnate Aristotle Onasses in October of 1968, the financial arrangement that accompanied the marriage gave her access to a level of resources she had never had before, not even during the White House years.

Onassus was one of the wealthiest men in the world. And Jackie, by every account of those closest to her, made the most of it immediately. According to the fabulous Bouvier sisters, a biography of Jackie and her sister Lee Radzswill, Jackie spent $1,250,000 on clothing in the first year of her marriage to Onasses.

In today’s currency, that figure is approximately equivalent to $9 million in a single year on clothes. The spending reflected both a genuine love of fashion and a degree of freedom she had not experienced before. During the Kennedy years, she had been subject to the political constraints of being the American first lady, required to appear in Americanmade clothes and to manage public perception of her spending with care.

During the years after the assassination, she had been genuinely constrained by finances, relying on income from Kennedy family trust funds and a government pension that, however generous by ordinary standards, was nowhere near sufficient to support the lifestyle she was accustomed to. Marrying Onasses resolved that constraint definitively.

Onasis responded to the spending by establishing a monthly allowance. He gave Jackie $30,000 per month to spend as she pleased in the early years of the marriage, an amount that would be worth approximately $260,000 in today’s money. The allowance sounds generous until you do the arithmetic. $30,000 per month over 12 months is $360,000 per year, less than a third of what she had spent in the first year.

She was exceeding the allowance constantly. Onasis eventually reduced the allowance from $30,000 to $20,000 per month. According to documented accounts of the marriage, the reduction did not significantly change Jackie’s behavior. She simply found other ways to supplement what she had, a strategy that led directly to the consignment arrangement described in the next fact.

Jackie Kennedy spent her entire public life managing the story of what she wore, how much it cost, and what it meant. She wrote detailed letters to personal shoppers and sent back shoes that were not right. She charged her bills under other people’s names. She sold her couture dresses in secret and pocketed the money.

She wore a political workaround to a presidential motorcade and refused to take it off for the next 20 hours. And at the end of all of it, the most famous thing she ever bought is sitting in a sealed vault in Maryland, unavailable to anyone until a date that is more than 75 years away. The shopping habits were not small or incidental.

They were, in their way, as carefully managed and as historically significant as everything else she ever did. If you found something in this video you did not know before, leave a like and subscribe so you do not miss the next one. There was a lot more history to get