But she was amused, rather than offended; the star of the show in Dallas and in New York. For wherever she went, people wanted to know what she thought, what she wore, what the future of fashion would hold. If France had found her lacking, then in America, Mademoiselle Chanel’s life still seemed full of promise; and her designs were worn by the most promising of women, none more so than Jackie Kennedy. In August 1959, Mrs Kennedy had appeared on the front cover of Life, in sharp focus in the foreground while her husband stood behind her, as if in a supporting role. ‘A Front Runner’s Appealing Wife’ ran the cover line, beneath a photograph of Mrs Kennedy in pearls and a pastel pink dress. Inside, there were more pictures – Jackie on horseback, Jackie with her daughter Caroline on the beach, Jackie with her husband, Senator John F. Kennedy – and an accompanying, admiring piece: ‘As the campaigning for the 1960 presidential election gathers steam, the U.S. is going to see more and more of one of the prettiest women to decorate a flag-draped speakers’ platform … Hatless but stylishly dressed in clothes mostly of her own design, Jackie makes a graceful, refreshing appearance at teas, barbeques and factory visits.’
No mention was made of Chanel, nor of any other designer, but in fact Mrs Kennedy’s clothes were soon to become a talking point in the Kennedy Nixon campaign. She knew the political value of dressing down as a candidate’s wife, aware that she should not be seen as extravagant; indeed, as she herself was to observe in a letter to Oleg Cassini, a French-born Russian-turned-naturalised-American who was to become one of her principal designers, ‘I refuse to be the Marie Antoinette or Josephine of the 1960s.’ Nevertheless, she was already a customer at Chanel, amongst other French designers, as was her mother-in-law; a vexatious issue, given that her husband had been cautioned by David Dubinsky, the powerful president of the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union, that Jackie had to buy American.
By September 1960, when John Fairchild received an urgent cable in Paris from the New York office of Women’s Wear Daily (‘Send story Kennedy purchases in Paris couture’), he knew the significance of the request. ‘We immediately started checking every Paris couture house. We found Jacqueline and Mrs Joseph P. Kennedy were important private customers in Paris … both Kennedys at Dior, Balmain, Grès, Rouff, Ricci, Griffe, Lanvin – and Jacqueline Kennedy, it was said, had bought heavily at Cardin, Grès, Givenchy, Balenciaga, Chanel and Bugnand.’ Fairchild sent a cable back to New York with the news: ‘The Paris couture reports that the two Kennedys together spent an estimated $30,000 last year for Paris clothes and hats’; a figure that was, in Fairchild’s opinion, ‘not really a lot for elegant women’. But the reaction to the news was swift, as Fairchild noted: ‘The Associated Press picked up the Women’s Wear Daily story, reporting Jacqueline Kennedy had spent $30,000 for Paris clothes. The AP ignored the important fact that the $30,000 figure was for both Rose K. and Jacqueline K.
‘Overnight the Republicans made the Kennedy Paris fashion sortie a campaign issue. The Republicans pictured Mrs Pat Nixon as the simple, hometown woman, in her simple old cloth coat. What they didn’t say was that Mrs Nixon had been shopping at Elizabeth Arden, New York, where the prices were higher than Paris.’ The story soon spiralled and spread; when Mrs Kennedy pointed out that her rival’s dresses from Elizabeth Arden were every bit as expensive as her own Paris couture, Mrs Nixon’s retort appeared in The New York Times: ‘I buy my clothes off the rack and I look for bargains like all other American women.’ Meanwhile, Time reported that Mrs Kennedy was upset about the stories of her Paris spending-sprees, ‘devil-may-care chic’, and of French couturiers keeping ‘a Jacqueline Kennedy fashion dummy close by for fittings … “They’re beginning to snipe at me about as often as they attack Jack on Catholicism,” said Jackie, who also gets mail criticising her for her “floor mop” hairdo. “I think it’s dreadfully unfair.” That $30,000 figure was dreadfully unfair, too, said she … “I couldn’t spend that much unless I wore sable underwear.”’
On 8th November 1960, John F. Kennedy was elected president; a week later, his wife wrote a letter to WWD, pointing out the inaccuracies of press speculation about her supposed purchases for the Inauguration. Fairchild responded with an offer to publish a portion of the letter as the First Lady’s ‘Fashion Philosophy’, which duly appeared on the front page of the magazine. ‘When Jacqueline Kennedy moves into the White House she will wear only American clothes and she is looking forward to it … What fashion news can be expected from Mrs Kennedy in the next four years? She will not order a great many clothes. She does not believe a public figure can be photographed only once in the same outfit. She will wear simple and fairly timely fashions which will do hard work for her. She does expect interest to be taken in the “Kennedy Fashion Look” but is determined her husband’s administration not be plagued with fashion stories of a sensational nature. Mrs Kennedy appreciates good clothes, and will continue to dress her type, but will strive to be appropriately dressed for official life. As a young and active woman, she simply does not have the time to be always shopping and besides this kind of extravagance has always been abhorrent to her.’
As it turned out, Mrs Kennedy did not wear only American clothes, despite the official insistence on her being seen to do the right thing; a role in which she was to play the patriotic young wife of a president who seemed to be unassailable in his position as the Real Thing. Behind the scenes, however, compromises were being made, in this and other matters. In June 1961, when she accompanied her husband on a state visit to France, Mrs Kennedy wore an ivory satin evening gown by Givenchy to a dinner at the Palace of Versailles. Such was the impact that she made as a Francophile – wearing French, speaking French – that even the austere de Gaulle was visibly charmed, prompting France-Soir to declare in a headline, ‘Versailles at last has a Queen.’ When the time came for the Kennedys to return to Washington, the president remarked in a press conference, ‘I am the man who accompanied Jacqueline Kennedy to Paris.’
She also continued to add Chanel pieces to her wardrobe, albeit with some circumnavigation. The Chanel archive reveals that Mrs John F. Kennedy was a couture customer between 1955 and 1968, making regular orders before her husband became president, aside from 1957, when she gave birth to her baby, Caroline, in November. After 1960, she continued to buy Chanel, but in secret and via her friend Letizia Mowinckel (who pretended to be shopping for a cousin, supposedly a Sicilian noblewoman) and her sister, Lee Radziwill. A further diplomatic solution was reached, whereby Mrs Kennedy was able to acquire Chanel outfits sewn for her in New York by a dressmaking establishment called Chez Ninon. The garments were not fake or pirated, but made to order using materials supplied by Chanel in Paris. (Unlike other couturiers, Chanel never sold patterns, but adhered to what was known as the ‘line for line’ system, keeping as close as possible to the original design.) Mrs Kennedy did not save money by doing so – the prices at Chez Ninon were on a par with those at Chanel, with a suit starting at $850, and evening gowns running into the thousands – but she did save face, as an implicitly patriotic patron of an American dressmaker.
Thus it was that she came to be wearing a vivid pink Chanel suit (complete with fabric, trim and buttons from 31 Rue Cambon, but fitted at Chez Ninon) on 22nd November 1963, accompanying her husband to Dallas. It was not the first time the president’s wife had worn the suit, of which the original had come from the Chanel autumn/winter 1961 couture collection. Mrs Kennedy had been seen in it on several previous occasions, including a visit to London in 1962, and it was said to be a particular favourite of her husband. In a subsequent interview with the writer William Manchester, Mrs Kennedy recalled how the president, shortly before their trip to Dallas, had for the first time in their marriage asked what she planned to wear: ‘“There are going to be all these rich, Republican women at that lunch,”’ J.F.K. told her, ‘“wearing mink coats and diamond bracelets. And you’ve got to look as marvelous as any of them. Be simple – show these Texans what good taste really is.” So she tram
ped in and out of his room, holding dresses in front of her. The outfits finally chosen – weather permitting – were all veterans of her wardrobe: beige and white dresses, blue and yellow suits, and, for Dallas, a pink suit with a navy blue collar and a matching pink pillbox hat.’
When the First Couple arrived on Air Force One at Dallas’s Love Field airport, Mrs Kennedy was given a bunch of red roses; the few surviving colour photographs show her looking radiant in the pink suit, the flowers in full bloom in her arms, the November sky blue beyond the wings of the aeroplane. Afterwards, riding beside her husband in an open limousine as the presidential motorcade travelled through Dallas, her husband asked her to remove her dark glasses because the crowd had come to see her face.
The vice-president’s wife, Lady Bird Johnson, was following two cars behind the Kennedys with her husband, Lyndon Johnson. Later, she wrote in her diary that the sunlit streets were lined with people: ‘One last happy moment I had was looking up and seeing Mary Griffith leaning out a window waving at me. (Mary for many years had been in charge of altering the clothes which I purchased at Neiman-Marcus.)’ Then she heard a shot, and two more in rapid succession. At first, she thought these were the sound of celebratory firecrackers, but as her car accelerated, she heard someone say, ‘Have they shot the President?’ When they pulled up outside a hospital, she was hustled into the building by the Secret Service agents. ‘I cast one last look over my shoulder and saw in the President’s car a bundle of pink, just like a drift of blossoms, lying in the back seat. It was Mrs Kennedy lying over the President’s body.’
After the president was declared dead and his body taken in a casket to Air Force One, wrote Mrs Johnson, she stood beside her husband as he took the oath of office on board the aircraft. Jackie Kennedy was also there, ‘her hair falling in her face but very composed …I looked at her. Mrs. Kennedy’s dress was stained with blood. One leg was almost entirely covered with it and her right glove was caked, it was caked with blood – her husband’s blood. Somehow that was the one of the most poignant sights – that immaculate woman, exquisitely dressed, and caked in blood.
‘I asked her if I couldn’t get someone in to help her change and she said, “Oh, no …” And then with almost an element of fierceness – if a person that gentle, that dignified, can be said to have such a quality-she said, “I want them to see what they have done to Jack.”’
Jackie Kennedy kept the same suit on, still stained with her husband’s blood, when Air Force One returned with his coffin to Washington, and did not remove it until early the next morning. When she finally changed out of the suit, her maid folded it and put it in a box. A few days later, the box was sent to Mrs Kennedy’s mother, who wrote ‘November 22nd 1963’ on top, and placed it in her attic. Eventually, the suit was given to the National Archives for safekeeping, where it still remains, stored away from public view. It has never been cleaned.
Whatever else died with Kennedy’s assassination, the Chanel suit survived, a shred of visible evidence from a split second when history was made, even as it appeared to fall apart. In the aftermath of the president’s death, the bloodstained suit seemed emblematic of the ending of innocence, of a time before JFK’s reputation was stained by the gossip about his infidelities and compromises; before the news of his affair with Marilyn Monroe had been made public, picked over and dissected in the context of her own unhappy end. And although it was kept out of sight, the Chanel suit lived on in photographs (the majority of them in grainy black and white); a troubling reminder of a lost era that was at first deemed golden, and then turned into something more tarnished. In retrospect, Mrs Kennedy’s Americanised Chanel was never entirely uncomplicated, from the moment of its creation, even without the president’s blood on it. Yet for all that, it served as a reminder of an age before Jackie Kennedy had become Jackie O, the haunting images of her as a grieving black-clad widow at her husband’s funeral replaced by the photographs of her in a short white wedding dress with her billionaire second husband.
Whatever the painful associations, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis did not stop buying Chanel. Even when her couture purchases became infrequent, and she turned instead to Courrèges and Valentino, she continued to wear the scent that Marilyn Monroe had made famous, dispatching a private jet from her husband’s Greek island to Paris with a secretary on board to buy bottles of Chanel N°5 in the boutique at Rue Cambon.
Mademoiselle Chanel did not comment on the bloodstained pink suit, although several years after Jack Kennedy’s death, she was sharp-tongued on the subject of his widow, telling James Brady at Women’s Wear Daily that she disapproved of Jackie Kennedy wearing miniskirts: ‘she wears her daughter’s clothes.’ The oracle had spoken, but afterwards, she worried aloud to Marcel Haedrich, the editor of Marie Claire, that she might have gone too far. But then Chanel reassured herself that she was right, as always. ‘When one makes up one’s mind to tell the truth, one has to go all the way.’
SCISSORS
When Gabrielle Chanel stepped into her realm at Rue Cambon, her assistant would hang a long white tape around her neck with Mademoiselle’s special scissors threaded through it, like a ceremonial necklace. Other pairs of scissors were always within her reach – silver and gilt ones arrayed in her apartment and in rows on her dressing table at the Ritz; another on a plain white napkin on the bedside table, lying beneath an icon given to her by Stravinsky.
In old age, when Chanel was showing Claude Delay her gold boxes from the Duke of Westminster, she pointed out the coat of arms engraved on the top. If she were to mark her own emblem next to his, she said, ‘I would add my scissors.’ By this point, Chanel was never seen sewing – she had left that far behind her, back in her modest past as a seamstress, and before then, as a child of the orphanage – but she still wielded her scissors on a daily basis to shape and remake her creations. ‘What you have to do is cut,’ she said to Delay. The younger woman watched Chanel at work in her studio at Rue Cambon, surrounded by her staff, pinning and cutting the cloth on a series of models, working until all those around her were exhausted, taking apart a suit dozens of times, readjusting a hem, an armhole, or a sleeve until she was satisfied that it was perfect. As Time reported in August 1960, in an article that declared her to be the ‘High Priestess of High Fashion’, ‘the surrest touch in fashion is still Chanel’s. She is no innovator for novelty’s sake. She devotes her energies to barely noticeable refinements of detail of her suits and dresses, e.g., jackets are shorter this year, a little closer to the body. With scissors hanging from a ribbon around her neck and her four fingers firmly together in a characteristic Coco gesture as she pats a new suit in various places, she may say: “Make a pleat here, an intelligent pleat.” One of this year’s suits was changed 35 times after being made up before Coco was satisfied.’
As her hands moved over the model’s body, her fingers feeling the flesh beneath the cloth and her scissors snipping, the tittle-tattle spread that Mademoiselle Chanel was a lesbian, that she touched her models in ways that she would never touch a man again. But those who knew her best said that her relationships with her models (including her favourites in the Fifties, a young Frenchwoman, Marie-Hélène Arnaud, and the Texan Suzy Parker) was a curious mixture of mothering and mentoring, rather than anything truly sexual. Bettina Ballard had experienced this herself, in her early years working for Vogue in Paris, and described Chanel as ‘a sorceress’, but one who seduced with words, to turn her protégées into versions of herself. ‘She had, and still has, a strong proselytizing instinct. She likes converting people to her way of thinking, dressing, and living, particularly the young, who have a certain amount of hero worship for Chanel. I fell into this category immediately.’ A quarter of a century later, Ballard saw the same process at work with Suzy Parker, who had been photographed on the front cover of Elle with Chanel, in a portrait that seemed closer to that of mother and daughter than designer and model. Certainly, when Suzy Parker had her first child in 1959, she named the baby girl Georgi
a Belle Florian Coco Chanel, and Mademoiselle became godmother to her namesake.
While the gossip about Chanel’s sexuality continued, fuelled by an improbable story that she had been flirting with Jacqueline Susann, the best-selling author of Valley of the Dolls, she herself scoffed at the idea. As always, she was equally liable to dish the dirt on others. (Noël Coward noted in his diary for 29th November 1948: ‘Lunched with Coco Chanel. Not a good word spoken about anyone but very funny.’) But according to her friend Marcel Haedrich, Chanel was also hurt by the whispers about her sexuality. Shortly after her death, he wrote, ‘I can still hear her bewailing a rumour about her that had to do with her supposed feelings about one of her models: “Imagine – me, now! An old lesbian! It’s unbelievable how people dream up these things.”’ Haedrich sensed Chanel’s vulnerability as she spoke, and the depth of her feeling of humiliation: ‘It was shattering.’ She also told him that she had given up on love altogether. ‘Love? For whom? An old man? How horrible. A young man? How shameful. If such a terrible thing happened to me, I’d flee, I’d hide.’
If Chanel felt that to love a man in old age would be appalling, then her feelings about women were too complex to be easily categorised. Misia was dead, finally silenced, yet irreplaceable; for at the end of their long-running power struggle, there was no one left who had influenced Chanel, no one who had known her before her mask of fame had set hard. But she still knew how to control other women, how to remake them as she saw fit. Cecil Beaton, who sketched Chanel with her scissors hanging around her neck, had long observed her command over her clients and models, and her ability to turn them into androgynous creatures. ‘She hated the way hairdressers set their clients’ hair in tight waves like cart ruts,’ he wrote, before her comeback collection, ‘and would take nail scissors and crop the hair of her favourites herself. She then set about concealing their breasts and buttocks. Women began more and more to look like young men, reflecting either their new emancipation or their old perversity.’
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