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Jacqueline Kennedy: The White House Years—
Selections from the John F. Kennedy Library and Museum
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Jacqueline Kennedy at the Palace of the Maharajah, Udaipur, India, March 17, 1962. Dress (1962) in apricot silk ziberline by Oleg Cassini (b. France 1913). John F. Kennedy Library and Museum.
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More about Exhibition Highlights
Also featured were many of the clothes worn by Mrs. Kennedy on state visits, including extensive elements from her solo trip to India and Pakistan in 1962, and the Kennedys' visit to South America in 1961. Other historic pieces included the beaded gown in which she dazzled Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev in Vienna in 1961, and, from her visit to France, also in 1961, the imperial dress and opera coat worn to President de Gaulle's state dinner at the Palace of Versailles. From her visit to Rome came the austere black dress worn for her audience with Pope John XXIII.
According to Hamish Bowles, creative consultant to the exhibition, the costumes vividly illustrate that, as First Lady, Jacqueline Kennedy's personal style choices were to prove a visual metaphor for her cultural aspirations for the White House. Under her aegis, it would become an exquisite and stylish showplace, and a background for a worldly and sophisticated mix of guests drawn from the realms of arts and culture as well as national and world politics and diplomacy.
In this way, Jacqueline Kennedy's personal style was a timely continuum, bridging the divide that then separated the old world from the new, the values of assured patrician elegance with the "youthquake" of energy, dynamism, and forward-thinking modernity of the later 1960s. She emerged in "Jacqueline Kennedy: The White House Years—Selections from the John F. Kennedy Library and Museum" as at once a paradigm of old-fashioned dignity, and an eternal cultural icon.
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