Even on the presidential campaign trail, Jacqueline Kennedy’s Francophile elegance—focusing on impeccably made clothes of simple lines—drew all eyes. The era’s obligatory hats, meanwhile, were sublimated to her important hairstyle.
On duty as First Lady, Mrs. Kennedy’s impact was profound—a visual metaphor for the President’s youthful, internationally minded administration, and a symbol of a new era of cultural sophistication at the White House. For her formal daytime ensembles, she took a leaf from Britain’s royal dressmakers and their clients, avoiding prints and instead using brilliant solid colors and bold lines that helped her to be easily distinguished in a crowd. Her majestic, strong-silhouetted evening gowns, meanwhile, showcased her statuesque figure and married French grandeur to a thoroughly American breeziness.
Throughout, her disciplined elegance revealed an equestrian’s fastidious approach to dressing. Off duty, meanwhile, Jacqueline Kennedy was every inch the liberated sixties woman, barefoot in capri pants and sportif tops that were always chosen with an eye to simplicity of line.
During the Onassis years, a jet-set glamour crept in as she shielded herself from the paparazzi gaze behind her trademark bug-eyed sunglasses. That glamor was well-served by her friend Valentino’s sleek day clothes and romantic evening looks. As an esteemed literary editor in the seventies, she dressed the part in a working-woman wardrobe that was practical yet faultlessly stylish.
In the eighties, she subdued that decade’s sartorial excess through her own rigorous taste filter and found an apt sartorial accomplice in Carolina Herrera.
For what would prove to be one of her last public appearances, for the American Ballet Theatre gala at the Metropolitan Opera House in 1993, Jacqueline Kennedy wore a dress by Herrera of white crepe with rhinestone buttons. During the fitting, Mrs. Kennedy Onassis subtly altered the placement of those buttons from the original runway model, streamlining the effect and proving her enduring taste for perfectionism in all things.
With the 50th anniversary of her husband President John F. Kennedy's assassination upon us on November 22, we look back at her timeless style.