Her name was Jacqueline Kennedy Onasses. America doesn’t have a queen. But for a few years in the early 1960s, honestly, it didn’t need one. And whatever she touched, the rest of us have spent the last 65 years trying to copy. The bag, the sandals, the sunglasses, the lipstick, the watch, the perfume she only wore when no one was looking.
20 things in total. Almost none of them were custom made. You could have walked into the same shops, bought the same things. A million women did. And somehow it never looked quite the same on anyone else. So what was the secret? Let’s start in New Delhi. March 1962. The temperature is pushing 90° F. And Jacqueline Kennedy steps off the plane for a two-week Goodwill visit to India and Pakistan.
Crowds, cameras, reporters documenting everything she wears. It’s one of the most photographed trips of her time as first lady. The local press follows her everywhere. Delhi, Agra, Udipur, Veroni. Cameras in her face from sunrise to sunset. Every outfit gets cataloged. Every accessory gets noted. And on her shoulder in nearly every frame is the same bag.
Soft leather, a simple piston clasp. A travel bag from Gucci off the shelf. The kind of thing you or I could have bought any afternoon. As first lady, she could have carried anything, but she kept choosing this one. She carries it through airports, through arrivals and departures, moving quickly, rarely stopping for long. India, Rome, Paris, a regular Tuesday in Manhattan.
Same bag. Honestly, I think this is where the Jackie magic starts. Not in what she could afford, but in what she refused to stop using. Because the press notices Gucci wouldn’t officially rename it the Jackie until 1999, but by then the world had already made the connection for them. The bag is still in production today.
The silhouette, the piston clasp, all still there. You can order one this afternoon. But here’s the real question. Would it look the same on you? A few months after India, she’s wearing something just as simple, somewhere completely different. Summer 1962, the Amalfi Coast. She and her sister Lee Radzul take over Villa Episcopio in Rell with day trips out to Capri.
What was meant to be a quiet trip turns into one of the most photographed holidays of her first lady years. For a moment, it looks like she might be able to disappear into it, but the cameras don’t really allow that. They follow her up cobblestone streets, into shops, onto boats. On her feet, flat leather sandals from a small shop called Canva, a family business that has been on the island since 1946.
Anyone could walk in and buy them. And she does. Every time she returns to Capri, she walks back into the same shop. Eventually, the shop names the design after her, the Jacqueline, just because she came back. Sound familiar? Within a few years, similar flat leather sandals start appearing back in the United States.
The Jack Rogers Navajo with its signature whip stitch and medallion becomes the American counterpart. Sold through Palm Beach boutiques and worn by women trying to capture some of that same ease. Those photographs of Jackie and Capri don’t stay on the island. They change what women back in the US start buying. In those same photographs, something else keeps showing up.
Oversized sunglasses big enough to cover half her face. The frames she wore through these years and the even larger ones she’d adopt after marrying Aristotle Onasses would eventually become identified with her. So much so that the public just started calling the whole style Jackie O. They become one of the first things people recognize about her.
Funny how that works. And then there are the pants, the high-waisted ankle crop silhouette she wore that summer. what we now just call Capri pants gets copied endlessly through the rest of the decade and beyond. She’s climbing steps, getting into boats, and moving through crowds. But beyond the cameras and the crowds, there were moments the public never saw.
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Moments like this one. Picture this. April 1962, the White House throws a dinner. 49 Nobel Prize winners in one room. White House is the scene of an awesome gathering of intellects as 49 Nobel Prize winners are guests at a dinner party. President Kennedy describes it as the most extraordinary collection of talent and of human knowledge in the White House with the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone.
> Jackie that evening, a pale gown, low heel, square gold buckle on her foot. In a room of noble laureates, the buckle still catches your eye from across the room. She wears them through her New York years, too. Events, evenings, public appearances that never fully go away. And the shoes are only the beginning.
Around that same time, JFK gave her something else. A Schlumbumber enamel bracelet from Tiffany and Co. It was the start of a collection she’d built over the years. Bright enamel, bold colors, unexpected combinations, and she keeps wearing them. She wears them through the rest of her White House years, then through Dallas and everything that follows it.
The man who gave them to her is dead within a year of the gift. But the bracelets stay, even through the years that she rarely speaks in public, through her marriage to Annasses and through her decades at Double Day. Now, let’s rewind. Late May 1961, Paris. Jackie is 4 months into being first lady. She speaks fluent French.
She studied at the sore bun, and she’s about to meet a country that already has an opinion about her. She steps off the plane in a navy OLED Cassini suit and pillbox hat, and France loses its mind. Every newspaper in the country runs her photo on the front page. And then at a lunchon a few days later, JFK stands up, takes the microphone, and introduces himself like this.
I am the man who accompanied Jacqueline Kennedy to Paris, and I’ve enjoyed it. >> And he meant every word. That trip wasn’t his, it was hers. 2 and 1/2 years later, that same silhouette appears again, but everything is different. November 22nd, 1963, Dallas, Texas. She wears a pink boulay suit that morning. Matching pillbox hat.
She wears it for the Dallas motorcade. By the afternoon, everything about that day has changed. The suit is still on her. Now it’s stained. Her husband, the president of the United States, dies in her lap. Air Force One sits on the tarmac at Love Field. Lynden Johnson is about to be sworn in as the next president.
And on that plane, her staff, Lady B Johnson, quietly tried to convince her to change. There’s another suit waiting. Someone’s already laid it out. She refuses. No, let them see what they’ve done. She wears that suit for nearly 12 hours. And it never appears in public again. It’s now stored at the National Archives, not on display, not photographed, sealed away at the National Archives by her family’s instructions for at least a hundred years.
After that, what she wears carries something different with it. Speaking of things she didn’t take off, there is the watch, a Cardier tank, rectangular case, Roman numerals, a gift from her brother-in-law, Prince Stannislaw Radzswell, an actual Polish prince, married to Jackie’s sister, Lee. The tank was originally designed in 1917.
Its rectangular case inspired by the overhead silhouette of Renault tanks crossing the Western Front in World War I. A piece of wartime industrial history on her wrist. She wears it at state dinners in the early 1960s. She wears it years later at her desk at Double Day, editing manuscripts, taking calls, just doing her job.
Cardier still makes the tank today. The watch tells one story. The bag on her shoulder tells another. The Chanel 2.55 quilted leather, long shoulder strap. That bag was designed by Coco Chanel in February 1955. That’s where the name comes from. For one specific reason, designed so women wouldn’t have to hold on to their bags. So they could move, shake hands, carry things.
Up until then, almost every handbag had a short handle. You held it in your hand. You couldn’t shake hands. You couldn’t gesture when you talked. Koko Chanel looked at all of that and said, “Enough.” And Jackie, she uses that bag exactly the way it was designed. Now, fast forward. The White House years end. Camelot collapses. The marriage to Aristotle Onases comes and goes.
Jackie is back in New York, older, quieter, working as a book editor at Double Day, reading manuscripts, editing pages, trying to build a life that isn’t about being watched. But the cameras don’t really go away. One photographer in particular, Ron Gala, keeps following her, waiting outside her apartment, trailing her on the street, photographing the same moments again and again.
In 1972, she finally takes him to court and she wins. The court orders him to stay 50 ft away from her and 75 ft away from her children. On appeal, those distances get reduced to 25 and 30 ft. Did he stop? Of course he didn’t. He keeps photographing her anyway. And in those photos, one detail keeps repeating. on her feet, the Gucci horse bit loafer, flat leather, metal bit across the toe.
Gucci introduced them in 1953. By then, she’d already been wearing them for years, just walking down the street and getting photographed anyway, whatever the court said. Eventually, he stopped under threat of jail. When Jackie’s not in flats, she’s almost always in something just as deliberate. Low heeled pumps from Roier Vivier, one of the most important shoe designers of the 20th century.
The man credited with the modern stiletto heel. In colder weather, she reaches for something else, a silk scarf from Hermes, tied under her chin, wrapped around her hair. She wears it riding horses at Glenn Ora, the Virginia farm where the family spends weekends through most of the White House years. She rides for hours and the photographers can’t quite reach her.
She wears them again at sea on Aristotle Onasses’s yacht in the late 1960s, wrapped tighter against the wind. She wears them while walking through New York, sitting in the back of a car with photographers just outside the window, sometimes pulled tighter when the cameras get closer. It becomes part of how people recognize her and how she keeps a little distance.
And then finally, we get to the pearls. There is a famous photograph of little John Kennedy Jr. tugging at his mother’s necklace while she laughs. The ones that sold for $21,500 at Southern in 1996. A triple strand of simulated pearls. Kenneth J. Lane, who designed costume jewelry for Jackie for years, would later sell reproductions of the design.
Lelay built his entire career on one idea, that glamour has nothing to do with what something is made of. Jackie became one of his best customers. She wears those fake pearls at state dinners next to actual diamonds. She wears them to literary parties in Manhattan years later when she could have worn anything in the world. Anything.
Real diamonds, sapphires. She picks the faux ones every time. April 1996, two years after her death, her estate goes up for auction at Sabes in New York. Many of the lots weren’t rare, weren’t unique, weren’t expensive to replace. And the triple strand pearls, those faux glass factory-made pearls made by Kenneth J.
Lane can be bought today for roughly $200 to $400. Several years before her death, she wore something much smaller, but just as remembered, a starfish pin from Kenneth J. Lane, one she owned and wore for years. It would later sell at her estate auction for over $100,000. By that stage in her life, Jackie isn’t dressing for cameras anymore.
She’s dressing for herself. And sometimes that means a little gold starfish. Now, let’s go where almost nobody has gone to see her, the bathroom. Jackie’s morning starts with a black bar of soap. Sema deep cleansing bar made by a Hungarian-born dermatologist named Dr. Erno Lazlo. Alongside it, a lotion, most likely light controlling toner, used twice a day, part of the same routine.
She never really changes. The makeup was just as simple. Foundation from Elizabeth Arden. same brand, same shade for decades. In February 1962, Jackie hosts a televised tour of the White House. Around 56 million Americans tune in. At the time, one of the most watched programs in American TV history. The country is staring at her face for an hour straight.
And what’s on that face? The same Elizabeth Ardan Foundation she’ll go on wearing for decades. Lipstick in coral and berry tones. Once she finds what works, she sticks with it. And then the most personal thing on this entire list. In 1968, on the day Aristotle Onesses proposed to Jackie, he bought her a bottle of Creler’s lovely Pachuli 55 from the perfume boutique at New York’s Plaza Hotel.
It’s warm, woody, pachuli heavy, and honestly, a little rebellious. It doesn’t match anything else on this list. Not the polished Chanel suits, not the careful Ardan makeup. It doesn’t match the version of her people saw in public. That’s exactly why she keeps it. She wears it for the rest of her life. Creler still makes the same fragrance today.
And on days when she isn’t wearing that scent, she reaches for something else. Jiggy from Gerlain. Created in 1889, still being worn. So 20 things. bag, sandals, pumps, sunglasses, scarves, watch, bracelets, pearls, a pin, a perfume, a bar of soap. You can buy all of it, but the part that made them iconic was never for sale.
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