Cassini Oleg - Jackie and Cassini: a fashion love affair

To my mother, Paula, who shares many of Jackies loveliest traits.

2016 by Lauren Marino

Published by Running Press Book Publishers,

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Table of Contents

contents

I believe she almost single-handedly created a revolution in good taste.

Oleg Cassini

L ONG BEFORE FASHION DESIGNERS AND THEIR muses became household names and celebrities started designing their own lines of clothing, the original celebrity style collaboration was between Jacqueline Kennedy and Oleg Cassini. Their work together made a lasting impact on the fashion industry and set the tone for a presidency. Together they invented the era of Camelot, which was, in a way, the countrys last age of innocence before the tragedies of John F. Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, and Martin Luther King Jr.s assassinations and the start of the Vietnam War. Jackie brought taste and elegance and a sense of pride in our countrys history to the White House and made it all seem accessible.

The American era reached its apogee in the Kennedy moment. There was, after so many years of doldrums, an unprecedented commingling of charm and idealism and beauty.

Oleg Cassini

In creating the Jackie Look, Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy and Oleg Cassini revolutionized the way that women dressed. Only thirty-one years old when she became first lady, Jackie undertook a historic renovation of the White House, created a much more modern, elegant, and yet informal style of entertaining for state dinners that included a huge appreciation of the arts, and became a political asset as a diplomat in her many successful trips abroad. She did it all in an elegant and streamlined wardrobe that was a huge contrast to the fussy, constricting, and exaggerated feminine shapes of the 1950s New Look and the stuffy dowager chic of earlier first ladies.

Jackie wasnt like her predecessors, Mamie Eisenhower, Bess Truman, and Eleanor Roosevelt. She was not only much younger and of a different era; given her upbringing she knew the importance of fashion and had a level of sophistication and sense of style missing in those that came before her.

She could arguably be called the original catalyst for the Youthquake of the 1960s, although her original intention was far more traditional: to be an asset to her husband. Jackies look was mimicked by women of all ages, not just throughout the United States, but all over the world: bouffant hair, low kitten heels, strands of pearls, A-line dresses, boxy jackets with big buttons, the pillbox hat, and rich colors and fabrics all became synonymous with the woman and her time. Her unique style played a powerful role in establishing Kennedys presidency.

My designs had to suit not only a lady with well-defined preferences but also a public figure whose life was governed by the strictest protocol.

Oleg Cassini

Oleg Cassini, who had worked as a costume designer in Hollywood in the 1940s and 50s, made him the perfect couturier for Jackie. He understood that as first lady she was our nations leading lady, and for this most important role, she required the right costumes. He designed a distinctive look for the young woman who would become a central character on the world stage.

Their collaboration created a sense of pride in the nation and changed the fashion industry so that American fashion became an export and major contributor to the economy for the first time. Up until that point, Europeanmostly French and Italiandesigners were the standard-bearers. As the administrations Secretary of Style, Cassini became, the best known name in American Fashion according to Eugenia Sheppard of the New York Herald-Tribune. And he had the perfect partner in the young and impeccable Mrs. Kennedy. Their influence in the way women dress is still felt today and can be seen on any classically styled woman on her way to the office or a dinner party.

By the fireplace the day of her coming-out party, at Hammersmith Farm, her mother and stepfathers house in Newport.

J ACQUELINE BOUVIER GREW UP AMIDST HIGH society in fashionable Newport, Rhode Island, on upper Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, and attended the prestigious all-girls finishing school, Miss Porters, in Farmington, Connecticut. Then she headed to Vassar and married the countrys most eligible bachelor at the time: handsome, charismatic Senator John Fitzgerald Kennedy, called Jack by those close to him.

At her home, Hammersmith Farm, in an unusually exuberant and unguarded pose, the day of her coming-out luncheon.