15 Weird Facts About How Jackie Kennedy Built Her Iconic Style – HT
She did not wake up looking like that. Nobody does. The image that became the most copied in America, the silhouette, the pallet, [music] the specific quality of composed physical presence that made every room she entered feel like she had always been the most important person in it was [music] built deliberately, intelligently over years of work that the finished result was specifically designed to conceal.
[music] The story of how it was built is one of the least told stories about one of the most documented women in American history. [music] The fashion press covered what she wore. The beauty writers analyzed the hair and the makeup. The cultural historians traced the influence. Nobody went back to the beginning [music] and asked the foundational question.
How did a young woman from a broken wealthy family who spent a year in Paris and married a senator and ended [music] up in the most scrutinized house in America arrive in her early 30s? at one of the most complete and coherent personal images in the history of public life. The answer is more interesting than the image itself.
It involves a year in Paris that changed everything. A letter to a designer that reads like a brief for an architectural project. A set of principles so specifically articulated that the designers who worked with her could not forget them. And a discipline so total that it held across 40 years and two marriages. [music] and one of the most traumatic events of the 20th century without wavering once she built something.
Here are 15 weird facts about how she built it. Fact one, the foundation was laid in Paris when she was 20 years old. The year Jaclyn Bouvier spent in Paris as a student at the Sorbon in 1949 and 1950 was not the origin of her style. She had aesthetic sensibility before Paris. The evidence of that is in the accounts of people who knew her in her teens, in the drawing she made, [music] in the specific quality of attention she gave to the physical world that was already characteristic of her in childhood.
What Paris did was give that sensibility a framework and a vocabulary and a city full of examples of what it looked like when aesthetic [music] intelligence was fully expressed. She arrived in Paris at 20 and she encountered for the first time in her life a culture in which the daily appearance of ordinary people was treated as a serious matter requiring genuine consideration.
French women of the postwar era did not dress randomly. They dress with intention within a tradition that stretched back centuries and that had produced a set of principles about proportion, quality, [music] simplicity, and the relationship between clothing and the body that was nowhere available in the American context she had come from.
She absorbed the principles the way she absorbed everything she encountered in Paris completely with the permanent retention of someone who understood that what she was learning was fundamental rather than supplementary. She understood at 20 that the French approach to appearance was not about fashion in the seasonal trend following sense that American magazines promoted.
It was about the development of a personal aesthetic and the [music] daily consistent expression of that aesthetic through the choices of how to dress and how to carry oneself. She came back from Paris with the foundation. [music] Everything that followed was the construction on top of it. Fact two. She spent her 20s studying what worked and what did not on her own body before she was famous.
The photographs of Jaclyn Kennedy in her 20s before the Kennedy marriage in the early years of the marriage in the years before the White House made her image a subject of public and professional analysis show a young woman who is clearly working something out. The style is good. [music] It is not yet the iconic thing it would become.
She is experimenting, refining, eliminating. [music] She was conducting in the years between her return from Paris and the inauguration in January of 1961 [music] a decadel long study of her own imit. She was learning what worked for her specific body, the specific proportions, [music] the specific way fabric fell on her particular frame, the specific relationship between her height and the hemlines and silhouettes that served her best.
She was learning what colors photographed well and which ones flattened or washed [music] out. She was learning which elements of the French aesthetic she had absorbed translated directly to the American context and which required adaptation. The experimentation was not random. It was the systematic investigation of a person who understood that the destination was a coherent consistent personal image and who was prepared to do the work of arriving there through deliberate trial [music] rather than happy accident.
She had the intelligence to observe what the experiments produced and [music] the discipline to hold on to what worked and discard what did not, which is the only process by which a personal style of genuine quality is ever developed. By the time she was 30, she knew what she was building. By the time she was 31 and standing in the White House, she was building it fully.
Fact three, she wrote a brief to [music] Oleg Cassini that was more like an architectural specification than a fashion request. The letter that Jacqueline Kennedy wrote to Oleg Cassini in the period between the election in November of 1960 and the inauguration in January of 1961 is one of the most revealing documents [music] in the history of American fashion.
It is revealing not because of what it says about fashion, but because of what it says about the mind that wrote it, the quality of thinking, [music] the clarity of vision, the precision of articulation that the letter demonstrates. She was hiring a designer. The letter was the brief. It described in terms that Cassini recalled for the rest of his life as unlike anything he had received from any other client.
Exactly what she needed. She needed a clearly defined image. She described what that image was and [music] what it was not. She needed clothes that were appropriate for every context. The first lady’s role required. The state dinners, the outdoor ceremonies, the official travel, the press appearances without being different clothes for each context.
She needed a visual vocabulary that was coherent across all of it. She told him what she would not wear. Anything fussy, anything overdone, anything with excessive decoration, anything that looked like it was trying to make an impression rather than simply being correct. She told him what she wanted to avoid looking like an American matron, looking like she was trying to look French, looking like anything other than specifically herself.
She told him she wanted to look like herself. Cassini understood immediately that she was not describing a preference. She was describing a project. She was commissioning not a wardrobe but a visual identity [music] and the specification was complete enough that the identity could be built to it. He had never received a brief like it.
He never received another one. He worked from it for 3 years and the result was the image the world knows. Fact four, she developed a set of style principles and applied them to every single decision. The principles that governed the style Jackie Kennedy built were not written down in any document that has surfaced in the historical record.
They were enacted daily across every clothing decision she made for 40 years. [music] The consistency of their application is what makes them reconstructible. What allows the historian or the close observer to work backward from the evidence of what she wore and what she refused to wear [music] and arrive at the underlying logic.
The principles were these or something close to these. Simplicity over decoration, quality over quantity, function over fashion, coherence over novelty, the whole over any individual part. Every specific [music] decision, the pallet, the silhouettes, the accessories, the hair was made in service of these principles [music] rather than in spite of them.
Every element was evaluated against the question of whether it contributed to the coherent whole or competed with it. The principles [music] produced in practice a set of specific preferences. Clean lines, [music] restricted color palette, accessories at the functional minimum, a hairstyle that framed rather than dominated, fabric weight and drape appropriate to the demands of the occasion.
Each preference was derable from the principles [music] and each specific choice was derable from the preferences. She had a style philosophy before she had a style. The philosophy was the foundation. The style was its consistent expression. [music] This is the reason the style held across 40 years and two completely different life contexts.
[music] The White House years and the post white house decades without losing its coherence. The specific expressions changed because the contexts changed. The underlying principles did not change because they were correct and she knew they were correct and correct things do not require revision. Fact five. She used the White House restoration as a laboratory for the same aesthetic intelligence she applied to her personal style.
The White House restoration project that Jackie Kennedy undertook in the first months of the Kennedy administration was officially a historical and curatorial project. The effort to furnish the building with appropriately significant examples of American historical furniture and decorative arts. It was also less officially and more fundamentally the application of the same aesthetic intelligence she brought [music] to her personal appearance to the physical environment she was going to inhabit.
She was doing for the White House what she had done for her wardrobe. Starting from principles, applying them rigorously, eliminating everything that did not serve the coherent whole and arriving at a result that looked inevitable [music] rather than constructed. The principles were the same.
Simplicity, quality, the subordination of individual elements to the coherence of the whole. The specific intelligence about how objects relate to each other in a space that [music] is the same intelligence she applied to how accessories relate to each other in an appearance. The restoration gave her something her wardrobe work alone could not give.
The experience of applying her aesthetic intelligence [music] at scale in a public context with professional curators and museum specialists who were evaluating the results against [music] the highest available standards. She learned from the project. The project extended and deepened [music] the aesthetic understanding she had been building since Paris.
The result, the most significant collection of American historical furniture assembled in the 20th century. Placed in a building that was transformed from an institutional space into something that felt genuinely inhabited and genuinely extraordinary was the evidence that the intelligence [music] was real. She had always believed it was real.
The White House confirmed it publicly and permanently. Fact six, she understood the relationship between her style and her public role better than anyone in the administration. [music] The Kennedy political operation was staffed with sophisticated people who understood professionally and at a high level how public image worked and what it produced.
They had elected a president on the basis of the most sophisticated use of television in political history. They understood [music] media. They understood image. What none of them understood as well as Jackie Kennedy did was the specific and complex relationship between her personal style and the diplomatic and political functions the first lady’s role required.
They saw the style as a PR asset to be deployed in service of the political agenda. She understood it as something more technically demanding than that. When she appeared alongside JFK at a state dinner, [music] she was not simply providing an aesthetically pleasing compliment to his appearance. She was functioning as a visual representative of American culture and ambition.
[music] And the visual representation needed to communicate specific things, sophistication, confidence, modernity in a visual language that was understood internationally rather than only domestically. The French couture she favored communicated across borders in a way that the democratic American sportsear the political operation preferred would not have communicated.
The clean architectural silhouettes she chose [music] projected a specific kind of cultural confidence. The restraint she practiced was itself a communication about the nature of the power she was adjacent to. She understood all of this and she had built the style to serve these functions.
The political operation sometimes thought it was managing her image. She was consistently ahead of them. Fact seven. She was the first American woman in public life to [music] understand that consistency was more powerful than variety. The conventional wisdom about personal style for public women in the early 1960s ran in the direction of variety.
The expectation that the first lady would change her visual presentation frequently enough to prevent press from running the same look in multiple editions. [music] The variety was supposed to demonstrate resourcefulness, fashionability, and the kind of active engagement with fashion that the women’s press expected from women of her position.
Jackie Kennedy went the other direction. She built a consistent image, and she maintained it without variation of its fundamental elements. The specific pieces changed. [music] The underlying vocabulary did not. Day after day, event after event, year after year, the image was recognizably the same image built on the same principles, expressing the same visual identity.
The effect of this consistency, which took several years to fully understand because it took several years for the consistency to become undeniable, was that the image became a signature. A signature is not produced by variety. It is produced by the repeated expression of the same essential thing in the same essential way [music] until the expression and the person become inseparable in the observer’s mind.
She had understood this. It was the same principle that governed her approach to everything she was building. The [music] most powerful thing you can express is who you actually are expressed completely and consistently. [music] The consistency of the image across 3 years of the White House made it iconic. The consistency of the image across 40 years of her life made [music] it permanent.
She had not been following the conventional wisdom. She had replaced it with her own and her own was correct. Fact eight. [music] She used her European trips as style intelligence missions that nobody acknowledged at the time. The official overseas trips that Jackie Kennedy took as first lady, the 1961 trip to France and Vienna, the India [music] and Pakistan trip in 1962.
The various European engagements of the Kennedy years were diplomatically and politically significant events that were covered extensively as such. They were also simultaneously style intelligence missions that she conducted with the same systematic attention she brought to every other aspect of her work.
[music] She was observing in every country she visited. She was watching how women of the relevant social and cultural world dressed [music] and presented themselves. She was identifying what the French fashion tradition looked like in its most current expression. How Italian style was developing in the period that would produce the explosion of Italian fashion in the late60s.
What the specific visual vocabulary of diplomatic femininity in different cultural contexts communicated to the audiences [music] those contexts were addressed to. The European trips of the Kennedy years produced a first lady who was by the end of the administration more sophisticated about the international visual language of formal public appearance than any American woman in public life had been [music] before.
She had been educated in the field by direct observation in the most relevant environments and she had applied what she observed to the continuing refinement of the image she was building. This was not an official function of the overseas trips. It was what she did while the official functions were being accomplished.
She was always doing at least two things simultaneously [music] and the thing nobody was officially acknowledging was frequently the thing she was learning the most from. Fact nine. She built the style specifically to survive the medium of television. John Kennedy’s 1960 presidential campaign had been in significant part a demonstration of the power of television as a political medium.
The first Kennedy Nixon debate had made it undeniable. How you appeared on television was a political fact of the same order as your policy positions. And the candidate who understood the medium was at a fundamental advantage over the one who did not. Jackie Kennedy had watched this lesson being learned and she had [music] applied it with the specificity of someone who was going to be on television constantly for the next 3 years to the construction of her own image.
[music] The television of the early 1960s was different from the television of later decades. lower [music] resolution, less forgiving of detail with a specific set of visual characteristics that favored certain colors, certain textures, and certain levels of ornamentation over others. [music] She had analyzed the medium. The pale clear palette she chose read cleanly on early color television in a way that saturated colors did not.
The simple, unorned silhouettes, she favored avoided the visual noise that elaborate detailing produced [music] at television resolution. The hair swept back from the face presented a clear, readable face to the [music] camera rather than the obscured and complicated image that forward sweeping styles produced. She had built the style for the camera as much as for [music] the room.
The two requirements overlapped significantly, but not completely, and where they diverged, she had made choices that served the camera rather than the room. Because the camera’s audience was larger and the camera’s judgment more permanent. The room saw her once. The camera’s [music] record lasted. Fact 10. She had a network of trusted advisers.
She used selectively and dismissed promptly when they stopped being useful. The development of Jacqueline Kennedy’s style was not a solitary project. She had at different points in her adult life specific people whose knowledge in specific areas was genuinely useful to [music] her, whose expertise supplemented her own in the domains where her own expertise had limits.
and she used [music] them with the same practical intelligence. She applied to every other resource. Kenneth Battel understood her hair in the specific way that a craftsman understands a material he has [music] worked with for years. He was useful and she kept him for decades. Oleg Cassini understood the [music] specific requirements of the role she was filling and the specific brief she had given him with a clarity that made the working relationship productive from the beginning.
She worked with him for three years at the White House and maintained the professional relationship afterward. What she did not do was allow any of these relationships to become the kind of deference to another person’s judgment [music] that would have compromised the primary authority over the image that she had always maintained as her own. Cassini was excellent.
She was the client. When he made suggestions that did not meet the standard of the brief she had given him, she said so when a piece did not work, it did not appear regardless of his enthusiasm for it. The advisers were tools [music] and she used them as tools with appreciation for their genuine utility and without the sentiment that would have kept them in place past [music] the point where they were useful. The image was hers.
The people who helped build it were contributors. The final authority was always entirely [music] her own. Fact 11. She revised the image after Dallas with the same intelligence she had [music] used to build it. The transition from the White House image to the post-W White House image was, like the original construction of the image, a deliberate and intelligent project.
She was 34 years old when she left the building. She had 30 more years of public life ahead of her. The image that had been built for a specific role was going to need to be rebuilt [music] for the specific role she now occupied, which was in some ways the most demanding role of her life. [music] The private person in the relentless public gaze, the widow of the most mourned president in American history, a woman who was trying to build a real life in the aftermath of an event that had turned her into a monument. [music] She
managed the transition with the same principles she had applied to the original construction. [music] The simplicity remained, the quality remained, the restraint remained, the coherence remained. [music] What changed were the specific expressions of those principles in the new context. The darker palette that reflected the life she was actually living.
The more contemporary silhouettes that track the evolution of the decade. The gradual retirement of the hat as formal requirements reduced [music] the evolution of the accessories toward the oversized sunglasses that became their own signature. She was not abandoning the image. She was maintaining the principles while updating the expressions.
The style philosophy that had produced the White House image was still intact and still governing. The style it produced was evolving with the person who held it and the person was evolving and the image that resulted was the accurate visual expression of who she actually was in the decades after Dallas.
The image had survived because the [music] principles had survived. She had built something durable enough to outlast the most traumatic possible disruption. That durability had been the intention from the beginning. Fact 12. She understood that her style was a form of cultural diplomacy and she used it accordingly.
The 1961 trip to France was one of the most diplomatically significant moments in the Kennedy administration’s early history and it was significant partly because of Jaclyn Kennedy’s French, [music] her near native fluency in the language, her knowledge of French culture and history and art and partly because of what she wore.
[music] She addressed for France with the specific intelligence of someone who understood that her appearance was itself a diplomatic communication and the communication she had chosen was accurate, [music] an American who understood and respected the French tradition well enough to dress in a way that demonstrated the understanding.
De Gaul was reportedly moved. The French public was reportedly delighted. The diplomatic effect was real and the administration knew it was real. JFK, who told a Paris press conference that he was the man who had accompanied Jacqueline Kennedy to France, was aware that the most significant diplomatic asset of the trip was standing next to him.
What the administration’s appreciation of the moment did not fully capture was the intelligence that had produced [music] it. Jackie had not dressed for France to please the French press or to provide her husband with a diplomatic asset. She had dressed for France because she understood French culture well enough to know what the correct dress was and she had the style intelligence to produce it.
The diplomatic effect was the consequence of the genuine understanding. She used the style as diplomacy because the style was genuinely informed enough to function as diplomacy. There is an important distinction between wearing fashionable French clothes to please a French audience and understanding the French aesthetic tradition well enough to participate in it authentically.
She did the latter. The French could tell. Fact 13. She never followed fashion. And that was the entire point. The paradox at the center of Jaclyn Kennedy’s style is that the most influential fashion figure in American history was not in any meaningful sense a fashion follower. She did not read Vogue to find out what she should be wearing this season.
She did not adjust her silhouettes to [music] accommodate the shifting hemlines of the mid 1960s. She did not adopt the trends that swept through the social world around her. She built a style and she maintained [music] it. The style evolved, but the evolution was internal, driven by her own ongoing refinement of the principles she had established, not by the external pressure of fashion cycles that she observed with the detached interest of someone for whom they were occasionally informative, but never directive. This was visible in the
contrast between her appearance and the appearance of fashionable women around her across [music] the same decades. The fashionable women of the early 60s wore the early60s styles and looked contemporary. Jackie Kennedy wore Jackie Kennedy’s style and looked timeless. The fashionable women of the early 70s wore the early7s styles.
Jackie Kennedy wore Jackie Kennedy’s style and still [music] looked timeless. Fashion was cyclical and therefore disposable. A style built on principles was durable because the principles were correct regardless of the season. She had understood this from [music] the beginning which was why the construction she undertook in her early 30s was built on principles rather than trends [music] and why the construction lasted.
The fashion press covered her as a fashion figure. She was something else, a person who had developed a genuine personal aesthetic [music] and expressed it with complete consistency. The fashion press was covering the surface. The surface was the expression of the depth [music] and the depth was what was actually interesting. Fact 14. The final version of the style was the most personal one and she built it in the last two decades of [music] her life.
The version of Jackie Kennedy’s style that is most fixed in the cultural memory is the White House version, the pillbox hats and the Cassini shifts and the pale pallet of 1961-63. This is the version that was most photographed, most widely reproduced and most directly influential on American fashion. It is [music] also in a specific sense the least personal of the versions she developed across her life because it was built to serve a public role and the public role’s requirements shaped the [music] choices.
The most personal version of the style was the one she was wearing in the last two decades of her life. The working editor walking to the double day offices on Park Avenue. The summer resident on Martha’s Vineyard. [music] The New Yorker moving through the city on her own terms. The well-cut trousers. The simple precisely fitted pieces.
the oversized sunglasses, the clothes of a person who had spent 40 years figuring out what she actually liked and was finally simply [music] wearing it. The principles were still present, the simplicity, the quality, the restraint, the coherence, but the expression was freed [music] from the institutional requirements that had shaped the White House version.
She was not dressing for the cameras, though the cameras were always present. [music] She was dressing for herself. The result was a style that combined everything she had learned across four decades of deliberate [music] construction with the ease of someone who no longer needed to think about the construction because it had become entirely natural.
She had built toward this for 40 years. The destination was always the same. The look that was so completely hers that it stopped being a look and became simply how she was. Fact 15. She built the style the same way. She built everything else. starting with what she actually believed and never deviating from it. every element of how Jacquellyn Kennedy built her iconic style, the Paris Foundation, the decade of experimentation, [music] the precise brief to Cassini, the set of governing principles, the consistency maintained
across 40 years, [music] the refusal to follow fashion, the durability through the most extreme disruption imaginable, the final personal version in the last decades. All of it reflects a single quality that was present in everything she did and that was the actual source of the style’s power.
She started with what she actually believed. She believed that simplicity was more powerful than decoration. She believed that quality was more important than quantity. She believed that coherence was the highest aesthetic virtue and that incoherence was the highest aesthetic failure. She believed that the appearance of a person should be the accurate expression of who the person was, not the performance of who they wanted to be seen as.
She believed that the work required to maintain a standard worth having was not optional but was the price of the standard and she paid it without complaint or acknowledgement for 40 years. She had arrived at these beliefs [music] through the specific education of her life, the Paris year, the decade of careful observation, the 3 years in the most public house in America, the 30 years of building a private life inside the public one.
and she had expressed them consistently and completely in every choice she made about how she appeared in the world. The iconic style was not a product of talent, [music] though she had talent. It was not a product of resources, though she had resources. It was the product of knowing what you believe and having the discipline to express it completely [music] without compromise every day for the rest of your life.
That is the hardest kind of style to build. She built it. It lasted. [music] If this video gave you something to think about, leave a like and subscribe.