THE JACKIE LOOK HAS NEVER GONE OUT OF STYLE
From Angelina to Natalie to Melania, celebrities are still influenced by the former first lady’s enduring elegance
The United States of the 1960s seemed the most glamorous, modern place in the world and Jacqueline Kennedy epitomized its appeal. But is that why she’s such an enduring figure?
It’s more than half a century since the woman called Jackie vacated the White House, yet her style is still considered not just relevant, but central to our ideas of what’s elegant and tasteful, to an almost weird extent. No other figure, apart from Audrey Hepburn, who was essentially Jackie’s celluloid doppelgänger, and with whom she shared the same overarchingly influential designer, Hubert de Givenchy, has cast such a powerful or long-lasting glow over the world’s ideas of how to dress, eat and even live. (She replaced the White House’s awkward rectangular dining tables with more convivial round ones, tossed out its schlockey early 20th-century furniture for elegant 18th-century pieces and filled it with decent art.)
Sure, her contemporary impact is amplified at the moment. Mad Men, with its fastidious fetishization of the style and mores of the early ’60s filtered through an early 21st-century sense of irony, helped propel mid-century furniture and architecture to its current hallowed status. Then there is Natalie Portman’s turn in the new film Jackie (no surname required) as the patrician first lady in her darkest hour, and the Jackie-inspired chartreuse Prada gown she wore to the Golden Globes recently — both universally eulogized. The film is set to dominate the red carpets, and fashion PRs are working overtime to spin some Jackie alchemy. Every ladylike bag has become a Get the Jackie Look Bag, every cropped jacket a Get the Jackie Look Jacket.
No need to ask whether the Jackie Look will catch on. It never latched off. Women were channelling her silhouettes and colour palette even before her husband became president. Pillbox hats and chin-length bouffants were everywhere. She didn’t invent them, but became a bridgehead between the sophisticated fashion magazine’s eye and the public. In the weeks up to his inauguration in 1961, inquiries about the first lady rivalled those concerning JFK himself. She was the first first lady to get her own press secretary. Women’s Wear Daily, until that point a trade-only magazine, became a society must-read when it transformed itself into What Jackie Wears Daily.
The fascination never abated. Whether it’s Princess Diana’s wholesale lifting of a pink Jackie suit and pillbox in the ’90s, the whisper-blue, bracelet-sleeve Jackie suit Angelina Jolie wore to collect her damehood from the Queen in 2014, the Duchess of Cambridge’s outfit on a Netherlands trip this past October, Anna Wintour’s beloved, semi-fitted sleeveless shift dresses — a constant in the latter’s wardrobe for the past 20 years — Jackie’s legacy lives on.
Ivanka Trump and latterly Melania Trump have also borrowed from Jackie’s vocabulary, an irony that wouldn’t be lost on her. The shift dresses may be tighter (Jackie hated tight clothes), the low block heels morphed into killer-heeled pointy toes, the Hyannis Port summer tan upgraded for a year-round one and the understated top-handled black bags traded for blingy versions, but the basic grammar’s intact. As for Amal Clooney, her references are so frequent, down to the vintage 1963 beaded Chanel dress she wore recently in Davos.
Some eras identified more strongly with the Jackie Look than others. In the ’70s, no one youthful or fashionable — including Jackie herself — was dressing the way she had in the Camelot years, but that’s because the life cycle of obsession means fashions are dead in the water 10 years after their zenith. Instead, women were scoping out her fluid calf-length Valentino dresses, white kick flares, oversized tortoiseshell sunglasses, animal-print coats, trench coats, peacoats and capri sandals. No one, not even Kate Moss, is immune to Jackie O evergreens.
One reason for the seemingly unassailable longevity of Jackie’s Camelot-era style is the charisma of the woman herself. An early template of modern mass media’s need to find non-Hollywood celebrities, her allure was even felt in Leningrad, where Moody Magazine extolled the Jackie Look. What cinched her modernity were the contradictions. Patrician from her pinky finger to that odd, breathy voice, millions of normal baby boomers nonetheless identified with her as a young mother. (She was the first first lady to give birth in the White House. Her son, Patrick, died two days later, three months before his father’s assassination.)
So even early on, there was glamour steeped in tragedy — an irresistible combination (she’d previously endured a miscarriage and a stillbirth). She defined herself in traditional terms, but there was clearly a steely core beneath the soft, gauzy carapace and she could hold her own on the world stage. There was her instinctive yearning for privacy and her understanding of the mutual pull of the public gaze. “More soldiers, more horses, more crying,” she ordered, for the state funeral of her husband. It was the same impulse that prompted those intimate shots of the young first family at play — seemingly candid pictures in which they all look immaculate.
As well, Jackie was not averse to playing the Simple American Mother card. One example is the cream cloth coat she wore to her husband’s inaugural swearing-in, when fur might have been expected — a double-entendre that played well to democrats and style watchers alike. The fact is, simple, architectural shapes suited her and photographed well.
In the intervening years, a growing appreciation of minimalism has kept Jackie’s wardrobe — or its spirit — topical. The lessons of Jackie-ness are on point: dress for your shape, keep it (deceptively) simple, obsess over details, and make your How to Dress maths 25 per cent fashion versus 75 per cent personal style.