15 Weird Facts About the Clothes Jackie Kennedy Refused to Wear – ht

 

Everyone knows what Jackie Kennedy wore. Nobody talks about what she refused to. The fashion record of the Kennedy White House is one of the most documented in American history. The Cassini shifts, the pillbox hats, the pale palette, the white gloves, the specific and consistent silhouette that made her the most copied woman in the world from 1961 to 1963.

The press documented every appearance. The industry replicated every look. The influence was enormous and it was lasting and it was entirely intentional. What was equally intentional and almost entirely undiscussed was the other half of the system. The refusals, the things she would not put on her body regardless of what the occasion demanded, what the political operation requested, what the fashion press expected, or what the protocol of the role suggested she ought to wear.

The list of what Jackie Kennedy would not wear was, in its way, as carefully constructed as the list of what she would and the two lists together are a more complete portrait of the intelligence behind the image than either one alone. She refused things because they were wrong for her body. She refused things because they were wrong for the image she was building.

She refused things because the political operation wanted her to wear them and she had decided the political operation did not get to make that decision. She refused things because they were fussy or overdone or failed her standard of construction or violated the specific and deeply held aesthetic principles she had been developing since her year in Paris.

 She refused with graciousness and without explanation and with a finality that everyone who worked with her eventually learned to recognize. When the answer was no, it was no and the no was always, in retrospect, correct. Here are 15 weird facts about the clothes Jackie Kennedy refused to wear, why she refused them, and what the refusals revealed about the woman who made them.

 Fact one, she refused to wear the standard first lady uniform and replaced it entirely. When Jacqueline Kennedy became first lady in January of 1961, there was an established visual vocabulary for the role, a kind of unofficial uniform that the women who had preceded her had worn in varying forms. It involved a certain kind of practical, widely accessible American fashion.

The kind of clothes that read as sensible and approachable and unthreatening to ordinary American women, the kind of thing that could appear in a Sears catalog without looking out of place. She refused it entirely. The refusal was not a tantrum or a fashion statement for its own sake. It was a considered decision about what the role required and what image best served both the administration and her own sense of what she was doing in the building.

 She had told Oleg Cassini in the letter she wrote before the inauguration that she did not want to look like an American matron and she did not want to look like she was trying to look French and she did not want anything fussy, overdone. What she wanted was a clearly defined image that was entirely her own. The previous first lady wardrobe, the sensible suits, the corsage friendly necklines, the comfortable shoes built for long receiving lines was not that.

 It was the costume of a role she was not going to play. She replaced the entire vocabulary with something that was architecturally clean, deliberately modern, and unmistakably hers. The woman who preceded her in the role had dressed to be accessible. Jackie dressed to be herself. The distinction produced a revolution in how the role was understood and how the woman who held it was perceived.

 She had refused the uniform on the first day and she never went back. Fact two, she refused to wear anything overdone or heavily decorated. The 1960s were, in many respects, a decade of ornamentation in women’s fashion. Beading, fringe, elaborate embroidery, extensive decorative detailing, these were standard elements of the formal wardrobe for women of Jackie’s class and social position and they were the things she refused most consistently and most emphatically throughout her public life.

She had a word for this category of thing, fussy. She used it in communications with Cassini. She used it in conversations with the dressmakers who worked with her. She used it to describe the entire aesthetic direction she was moving away from, the visual busyness that she found not merely unattractive but actively in conflict with what she was trying to achieve.

 Fussy clothes drew the eye to the decoration. She wanted the eye drawn to the person wearing them. The instruction she gave Cassini at the beginning of their collaboration was explicit on this point. Nothing ornate, nothing that called attention to itself as a garment rather than as the context for a person. The clothes were supposed to be the frame, not the painting.

 Any element of decoration that made the garment the center of attention rather than the wearer had failed by definition, regardless of its technical quality or its fashionability. This refusal extended to the accessories she chose and though she declined elaborate jewelry at formal events was replaced by simple, clean pieces that complemented the silhouette without competing with it.

 The famous triple strand pearls were significant precisely because they were not significant. They were present and correct and then invisible in the way that the best accessories are invisible. The overdone and the heavily decorated were the opposite of this and she would not put them on. Fact three, she refused to wear American sportswear to official events despite enormous political pressure.

One of the persistent battles of the Kennedy fashion years was the pressure from the political operation and from certain factions of the American fashion industry for Jackie to embrace American sportswear, the casual, practical, deeply American aesthetic of designers like Lilly Pulitzer and the brands that defined the leisure culture of the early 1960s. It was democratic.

 It was accessible. It was exactly the kind of thing that would have connected her image to ordinary American women in a way that her structured, French influenced wardrobe did not. She refused it for official contexts with a consistency that the political advisers found maddening. She was not opposed to American sportswear for private occasions.

 She wore it at Hyannis Port and on the Vineyard and in the context where she was not first lady but simply a person living her life. But she had decided, and the decision was never reversed, that the official wardrobe served a different function from the private wardrobe and that function required a different standard.

The first lady of the United States received foreign heads of state and represented the country at diplomatic events and appeared at state dinners where the visual language of what she wore was read as a statement about American sophistication and [clears throat] American ambition. The sportswear, however democratically appealing, did not carry that freight.

It was the right clothes for the right occasions and the official occasions were not those occasions. She understood the political argument for it and she made the aesthetic and diplomatic argument against it. And the aesthetic and diplomatic argument won every time because she was the one who controlled the decision and she was not going to change it because a press operation wanted her to be more relatable.

 Fact four, she refused to wear hats that did not serve a purpose. The pillbox hat is so associated with Jackie Kennedy that it reads, in retrospect, as inevitably hers, the hat she was always going to choose, the accessory that completed the silhouette she had been building. What is less known is the history of hat refusals that preceded the pillbox and the specific principle that governed which hats she accepted and which she declined.

 She wore hats when the occasion required a hat and when the hat in question did something useful to the overall effect she was creating. She refused hats that sat on her carefully maintained hairstyle in ways that disrupted or concealed it. She refused hats with brims wide enough to shadow her face in ways that would make her unreadable in photographs or at receiving lines.

 She refused hats with elaborate decorative elements that violated the fussy rule. She refused hats that were primarily gestures toward hat wearing rather than actual functional contributions to the look. The pillbox worked because it solved all of these problems simultaneously. It sat at the back of the head in a way that left the hair visible and the face entirely clear.

 It had no brim to create shadow. It had no decoration to compete with the face or the garment. It was, in the terms she applied to everything she wore, the minimum necessary element that accomplished the maximum necessary function. She wore it constantly because it worked constantly. The hats, she refused the wide brim picture hats, the decorative confections that had been standard in the formal women’s wardrobe she was replacing.

The practical covered styles that concealed rather than framed were refused because they failed the same test. She was not a hat person who had found her hat. She was a person with a visual problem she needed to solve who had found the solution and discarded everything that was not the solution. Fact five, she refused to wear clothes that had been designed for a different body type.

 Jackie Kennedy’s approach to the fit of her clothes was, by the accounts of the dressmakers and tailors who worked with her, the most exacting they had encountered in any client. She understood her own body with the precision of a person who had been thinking about how clothes interacted with a specific physical form for 20 years and she refused, consistently and without negotiation, to wear clothes that had been designed for a different physical type and then altered to fit her.

 This sounds like an obvious standard. It was, in practice, a position that eliminated a significant portion of the available fashion. Clothes in the early 1960s were designed, at the ready-to-wear level and at much of the couture level, for a body type that was not Jackie’s, broader through the hip, shorter through the waist, differently proportioned in the shoulder and the neck.

The alterations required to make those clothes fit her well enough to meet her standard were often more than alterations could accomplish. She would simply not wear them. What this meant in practice was that almost everything she wore in her White House years was either made for her from the beginning or so extensively reconstructed that the original design was essentially the starting point for a new garment.

 She was not acquiring clothes, she was specifying them. The standard was set by her body and her understanding of how clothes and body related and anything that did not meet the standard was refused regardless of its origin or reputation. The dressmakers who worked with her described the fittings as extraordinary for their precision.

She knew exactly what was wrong with a fit and she could articulate it in the technical language of construction. She was not saying it does not feel right. She was saying the shoulder seam needs to move a quarter inch and the hippies needs to be reduced and the hem at this point is doing something to the line that the hem at that point would not do.

The refusals were not subjective. They were technical and they were always correct. Fact six. She refused to wear anything that could not survive the physical demands of the first lady’s schedule. The White House schedule that Jacqueline Kennedy inhabited across 3 years was by any physical measure extraordinarily demanding.

 State dinners that lasted 4 hours, standing in receiving lines, overseas trips that moved through multiple countries and multiple formal events in compressed time, outdoor ceremonies in variable weather, press events under the specific and unforgiving conditions of 1960s television lighting. Public appearances where she would be photographed from every angle for the entire duration.

 She refused clothes that could not survive these conditions. This was a practical standard that eliminated in her judgment a significant amount of what was otherwise excellent fashion. Delicate fabrics that would not survive 4 hours of receiving line contact were refused. Pale colors that would photograph beautifully in a studio but read as washed out under the overhead lighting of a state dining room were refused.

 Silhouettes that looked correct standing still and became incorrect in motion that pulled at the hip when walking, that lost their line when a coat was removed, that were undermined by the physical engagement of an event rather than supported by it were refused. She tested clothes before she committed to wearing them publicly. She did not assume they would work because they had worked on a hanger or in a fitting room.

She moved in them. She sat down and stood up in them. She considered what they would look like from behind because the press photographs from state dinners included the full 360° and the back of the dress mattered as much as the front. The clothes that could not pass these tests were refused.

 The clothes that passed them were worn until they wore out. Fact seven. She refused to wear fur politically even when protocol expected it. The wearing of fur in the formal women’s wardrobe of the early 1960s was not the politically charged practice it would later become, but it was still for Jacqueline Kennedy a subject she navigated carefully and refused in specific contexts regardless of what protocol might have suggested.

She did wear fur. She was not making an early animal rights statement and the era did not frame the practice in those terms, but she declined to wear it in contexts where the wearing of it would become the story, where the image of the first lady in an elaborate fur coat would produce the press coverage about the cost of the fur rather than the function of the appearance.

She had watched other public women’s clothing choices become stories about excess and she had decided with the same practical intelligence she brought to every decision about what the image would and would not include that fur in certain context was a liability she would not accept. The refusals were never explained publicly.

She simply did not appear in the context where fur would have been expected wearing fur and the expectation quietly collapsed. She had decided what the visual vocabulary of the first lady’s wardrobe would contain and what it would not and she had decided this with enough completeness and enough early establishment that the press eventually understood the vocabulary she was working in and stopped expecting the elements she had excluded.

 The rule about fur was part of the larger rule about anything that risked making the clothing more visible than the person. Fur in the context she declined it would have made the fur the news. She was the news. The clothes were the frame. The frame was not supposed to be the story. Fact eight. She refused to wear the clothes JFK’s political team suggested she wear.

 The Kennedy political operation in the White House years was staffed with people who understood with professional sophistication the mechanics of image management and the specific political value of a first lady who connected visually with ordinary American women. They had opinions about what Jackie should wear.

 They communicated those opinions through the appropriate channels. She received the communications and she acted on them in the way she acted on all unsolicited input about her personal decisions. She considered them briefly and declined them. This was not hostility to the political operation. It was the same distinction she maintained in every domain between her role and the operations reach.

 She was the first lady. She controlled the wardrobe. The political team controlled the political messaging. The boundary between the two was hers to draw and she had drawn it clearly. The specific requests varied. She should wear something more casual to connect with working women. She should wear something more recognizably American to respond to the criticism about French fashion.

She should wear a specific color that tested better in certain regions. She should wear something that read as more maternal, less glamorous, more accessible. She wore what she had decided to wear. The political team suggestions were received, noted and did not change the outcome. The people who worked most closely with her eventually understood that the suggestions were not useful.

They stopped making them. She had established without confrontation and through the simple consistency of her refusals that this was not a decision that was made by committee. Fact nine. She refused to wear the same thing twice to events that were photographed. Among the practical rules that governed how Jackie Kennedy deployed her wardrobe, one of the most consistently maintained was the refusal to wear the same outfit twice in any context where the press was present and the photographs would be published.

This was not vanity. It was professional discipline applied to the management of the image. She understood with the clarity of a person who had thought carefully about how press coverage worked that a repeated outfit in a photographed context produced a specific kind of story that the first lady was wearing the same thing again, which was not the story, but that story created questions about the wardrobe and the budget and the planning that were all stories she did not want.

The image management required that each photographed appearance be its own visual statement, complete and distinct. This meant maintaining a wardrobe of significant volume which fed into the tensions with JFK about the budget, which fed into the elaborate financial management she conducted to keep the actual numbers from becoming a political problem.

 The practical requirement, unique appearances for every photographed occasion, had financial consequences she managed around because the alternative was worse than the management. The rule did not apply to private occasions. She rewore things in private and on vacation and in the domestic life of the household constantly. The discipline was specific to the photographed public context.

 In private, she wore what she wanted to wear. In public, she wore something she had not been photographed in before and the system she maintained to track what had been worn when and where was as complete as every other record she kept. Fact 10. She refused to wear clothes that competed with the architecture she was standing in.

 Jackie Kennedy’s understanding of how physical environment and clothing related was one of the more unusual dimensions of her aesthetic intelligence and it produced one of the more unusual categories of refusal in her professional wardrobe. She would not wear something that competed visually with the room she was going to be in.

 The clothes had to work with the architecture, not against it. This was a consideration that most people, even most fashion conscious people, do not apply to what they wear. Jackie applied it deliberately. If she was receiving guests in the Red Room of the White House, she was not wearing red. If she was appearing in front of the elaborate gilded architecture of a European state function, she was not wearing something that added visual noise to an already visually complex environment.

 If the room was extraordinary, she wore something that allowed the room to be extraordinary rather than competing with it for attention. The principle extended to what other women at an event would be wearing. She took into account where she could anticipate it. The visual context of the full scene she was going to be part of, not just the room but the crowd, the colors and levels of formality that the other guests would introduce.

She was composing a visual field in which she was one element and she was choosing her element in relation to the others. This was the same spatial intelligence she had brought to the White House restoration, the understanding that individual elements are not evaluated in isolation but in relation to the field they occupy.

 The clothes were never just clothes. They were an element in a composition. Anything that failed to work within the composition was refused regardless of its merits as a stand-alone garment. Fact 11. She refused to wear clothes that required her to think about them while she was wearing them. Among the functional requirements Jackie Kennedy applied to her wardrobe, one of the most practical and least discussed was this.

The clothes had to disappear once they were on. They had to be so correct in their fit and so appropriate to the demands of the occasion that they required no attention from her while she was wearing them. Anything that required management that pulled at the shoulder, that needed adjustment after sitting down, that demanded awareness of the hemline or the neckline or any other element of the garment’s behavior was refused. She was working.

 The state dinners and the press conferences and the diplomatic events were work and the work required her full attention. Every fraction of attention she spent on the clothes was attention she was not spending on the conversation, the room, the person in front of her, the thing she was actually there to do. She had eliminated that competition by eliminating the clothes that created it.

This was the deepest expression of the function first philosophy that governed everything she wore. The clothes were not the job. The clothes were what allowed her to do the job without distraction or impediment. The ones that met this standard, she wore consistently. The ones that failed it, that were technically beautiful but physically demanding, that required the wearer to manage them rather than inhabit them, were refused regardless of how they looked on a hanger or in a photograph.

She had told Cassini at the beginning that she wanted to be able to forget she was wearing clothes. To have the wardrobe become an unconscious element of the performance rather than a conscious one. The clothes she refused were the ones that made forgetting impossible. She would not wear them. She never wore them. Fact 12.

She refused to wear the morning wardrobe the world expected her to maintain after Dallas, after November 22nd, 1963. There was a broad public expectation that Jacqueline Kennedy would maintain some form of extended visible morning, that the wardrobe of the widow would be visually distinct from the wardrobe that preceded it, that black or the near black shades of deep morning would become the dominant palette of her public appearances for some extended period.

 She observed the formal morning period. She wore black for the funeral and for the official ceremonies of the weeks immediately after the assassination and she wore it with a completeness and a gravity that produced the images that became among the most powerful of her public life. She performed the official morning exactly as the occasion required, then she stopped.

 When she returned to public life, she wore color. She made the choice deliberately and she made it early before the period the world expected morning to last had expired. She refused the extended morning wardrobe the same way she refused everything else she had decided not to wear. Quietly, without explanation and with finality, she was not going to spend the rest of her life in black.

She had been a widow at 34 and she had 30 years of life ahead of her and she was going to live those years in color because the alternative, the professional widowhood performed in perpetuity through the clothes as much as through anything else, was not something she was going to accept. The refusal was personal and it was political and it was one of the most significant choices she made in the months after Dallas.

She had managed the visual language of the first lady’s wardrobe for 3 years with total precision. She was going to manage the visual language of what came after with the same precision. Black was for the death, color was for the life that remained. Fact 13. She refused to wear clothes that made her look approachable when the occasion required her to look commanding.

The conversation about Jackie Kennedy’s fashion tends to emphasize the accessibility critique. The argument from the political operation that she was too glamorous, too French, too unapproachable for ordinary American women. The conversation rarely addresses the opposite truth, that she sometimes refused clothes specifically because they were too soft or too casual or too approachable for the function they were supposed to serve.

She understood that different occasions required different registers of authority and she dressed the register deliberately. There were events where approachability was the right note, the garden parties, the children’s events, the informal encounters that the White House calendar occasionally permitted. She dressed those events in a way that allowed the warmth she was capable of to come through the clothes rather than being blocked by them, but there were also the state dinners where she was receiving the heads of governments, the

diplomatic events where she was functioning as a representative of the country’s power and sophistication. The formal occasions where the right note was authority rather than warmth. For those occasions, she refused the softer, more accessible options in favor of something that said exactly what the moment required.

The clothes that commanded a room were not the same as the clothes that invited someone into a conversation and she had both categories in the wardrobe and she deployed them correctly. The refusals in this direction were less discussed than the refusals in the fussy or overdone direction because they were less visible and less controversial.

But they were equally deliberate. She was not building a single note wardrobe. She was building an instrument with range and the range required knowing what to refuse as much as knowing what to choose. Fact 14. She refused at the end to wear anything that did not still feel genuinely like her. In the later decades of her life, the Doubleday years, the Martha’s Vineyard years, the years with Templeman, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, refined her wardrobe to a simplicity that was, by the evidence of the photographs from

those years, more personally expressive than anything she had worn during the period when the image was being most actively managed. The refusals in those years were of a different character from the White House refusals. She was no longer managing a public role. She was simply, finally, dressing herself. The things she refused were the things that felt like someone else’s idea of what she should look like at this stage of her life, the matronly shapes that women of her age were expected to move toward, the conservative palette that suggested

she was transitioning into invisibility, the safe and socially appropriate choices that she had never once accepted when the choice was hers to make. She wore what she liked, well-cut trousers, simple, precisely fitted pieces in the color she had always preferred, clothes that were recognizably in the tradition she had established but freed from the institutional requirements that had once governed the tradition.

 She was in her 60s, one of the most famous women in the world, and she dressed with the ease of someone who had spent 40 years figuring out exactly who she was and no longer needed to explain it to anyone. The final wardrobe was the most honest one. The image had been built for the world. This was built for her. Fact 15.

 The refusals, taken together, were a portrait of the person who made them. The list of what Jacqueline Kennedy would not wear is, when you look at it as a whole, one of the clearest portraits of her intelligence and her values that the available record contains. She refused the overdone and the fussy because she understood that decoration was a distraction from substance.

 She refused the clothes that did not fit her body because she had learned to trust the evidence of her own perception over the consensus of others. She refused the political operation’s suggestions because she had decided that her autonomy over her own appearance was not negotiable. She refused the morning wardrobe because she had decided that life continued and was going to be lived.

 She refused, ultimately, anything that was someone else’s idea of who she should be rather than her own idea of who she was. The affirmations, the things she chose, were built on the foundation of the refusals. She could not have built the image she built without the discipline to refuse the things that would have undermined it.

 The yes and the no were the same decision made from the same values in service of the same project, the construction and maintenance of a self so clearly defined and so consistently expressed that the world looked at the result and called it effortless. It was not effortless. It was the product of 40 years of daily decisions including thousands of small and large refusals applied with total consistency to every piece of clothing that crossed her threshold and failed to meet the standard she had set.

 She had known from the beginning what she was and what she was not. The clothes she wore were the things she was. The clothes she refused were everything else. If this video gave you something to think about, leave a like and subscribe. There is always more to the story. Asterisk, end of script, asterisk.