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As first lady, Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy revolutionized the taste of the nation. Not only did she promote culture and the arts at the highest levels, she also brought to the public's awareness a discriminating style and an expertise in fashion, decorating and entertaining. In so doing, as biographer Carl Sferrazza Anthony wrote, she became "a symbol of the liberation from the notion that America had to be bourgeois." While the Trumans and the Eisenhowers had projected an air of cozy domesticity and espoused America's middlebrow cultural preferences, the Kennedys, as Life magazine noted, "consistently asserted a broad interest in artistic and intellectual distinction."
Mrs. Kennedy's image as first lady was as carefully constructed as the stage that she set for her husband's presidency by scrupulously restoring the White House—a Herculean task that she accomplished in less than three years. Her personal taste gracefully spanned the divide that separated '50s America from President Kennedy's New Frontier. She was at once a paradigm of old-fashioned dignity and a reluctant pop-culture icon who, like her husband, had an intuitive understanding of the power of image in an age when television was becoming a potent medium. Perhaps Diana Vreeland, her valued friend and fashion mentor, expressed it most eloquently in her autobiography, D.V.: Jacqueline Kennedy, she wrote, "put a little style into the White House and into being First Lady of the land, and suddenly 'good taste' became good taste. Before the Kennedys, good taste was never the point of modern America. … And, since then, we've never gone back." Mrs. Kennedy also had a keen understanding of the semantics of dress and of the ways in which she could use her public image to help communicate the more abstract ideals that were important to her. By projecting a vision of dynamic, modern elegance, in fact, she provided a potent counterpoint to the tenets of the Kennedy administration, with its youthful idealism, ardent internationalism, and dedication to social change.
"The Strength Beneath the Silk," by Hamish Bowles, has been edited for STYLE.com; the complete article appears in the March 2001 issue of Vogue.
Excerpted from Jacqueline Kennedy: The White House Years, Selections from the John F. Kennedy Library and Museum. Text and design copyright © 2001 The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Reprinted by arrangement with Bulfinch Press, an imprint and trademark of Little, Brown and Company, Inc. All rights reserved.
Click here for the full article.
For a boat ride on Lake Pichola, in Udaipur, India, on March 17th, 1962, Jacqueline Kennedy wore a dress by Oleg Cassini.
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