She had access to everything, and she wanted almost none of it. That is the starting point for understanding Jacqueline Kennedy’s relationship with luxury. She was, across different periods of her life, the wife of one of the most politically powerful men in America, and then the wife of one of the wealthiest men in the world.
She had access to the full inventory of what money and position could acquire. She acquired a small portion of it, specifically and deliberately, and she paid almost no attention to the rest. The things she actually loved were not the things her position suggested she should love. Some were expensive. Some were not expensive at all.
Some were objects she had loved since she was 20 years old in Paris and had never stopped wanting. The luxury she valued was not the luxury of status display. It was the luxury of the thing that was exactly right, the specific object, book, fabric, scent, or experience that met the standard she had been developing since childhood for what genuinely good meant.
Here are 15 of her most genuinely loved luxury items. What they were and what the loving of them reveals. Fact one, the right books. Not collections, but specific volumes. She read until they fell apart. The books that Jacqueline Kennedy loved >> >> were not collected as objects of display. They were used.
The volumes in her personal library at the Fifth Avenue apartment and the Martha’s Vineyard house showed the evidence of actual reading, the marginal notes, the passages underlined, the dog-eared pages, >> >> the spines cracked from being held open for hours across multiple readings. She returned to specific books across years and decades.
The Greek tragedies that she had read in the winter after Dallas and had kept returning to for the rest of her life. The specific histories and biographies that she had been reading since her teens and that were still present on the shelves with the accumulated evidence of multiple engagements. The poetry she had loved since school and had never stopped reaching for.
She had been buying books since childhood at whatever bookstores were available and accessible. The book buying did not become more elaborate with the resources available to her in the Onassis years or the post-settlement years. It simply continued the same attention to the same quality she had always brought to it, applied to the specific book she found through the specific process of looking and reading and keeping what was worth keeping.
The most expensive book in her collection was not necessarily the most loved. The most loved were the ones she had carried through different periods of her life that had been present in the difficult years and the good ones that were worn to the condition that genuine use produces. A well-worn book in her collection was worth more to her than a pristine one.
Fact two, specifically made French perfume. One scent for 40 years. She wore Eau de Lanvin. She wore it from her young adult years until her death. She wore nothing else in the domain of fragrance not because she was unaware of the alternatives, but because she had found the right thing and had decided that replacing the right thing with novelty was not something she had any interest in doing.
The scent was part of the total identity she had constructed and maintained across 40 years, the specific sensory dimension of her presence that the camera could not capture, but that the room she entered experienced. The people who knew her and loved her described it as one of the things that came back most powerfully after she was gone.
The fragrance was the memory of her in the way that the photographs were not because the photographs were images of the public self and the fragrance was simply her. She had encountered French perfume seriously during her year in Paris and had arrived at her specific choice through the same process she arrived at every other choice about her appearance.
A clear-eyed assessment of what served her specifically and a willingness to discard everything that was not that. The assessment had produced Lanvin. She had stayed with Lanvin because the assessment had been correct and there was nothing to be gained from revising what was correct. The consistency itself was the luxury.
40 years of wearing the same right thing, the discipline to find the correct answer and keep it, rather than the distraction of perpetual seeking, was something most people never managed. Fact three, properly made French silk. She could identify it by touch alone. The relationship Jacqueline Kennedy had with the specific quality of French silk, the weight, the drape, the specific way it moved and caught light, was the relationship of a person who had spent decades studying the material as a craftsman studies a
medium. She had been handling fine fabric since her year in Paris, where the textile traditions of the French couture houses were treated as seriously as any other form of applied intelligence, and she had developed, through years of handling quality and handling its absence, a sensitivity to the material that was as precise as any other form of trained perception.
She could feel the difference between properly woven French silk and its various imitations. The difference was real, and it was significant. And it expressed itself in everything the fabric was used for the way it held a silhouette, the way it moved, the way it changed across a long evening in ways that either maintained the garment’s quality or revealed its inadequacy. She specified it.
When she was working with Cassini on the White House wardrobe and in the private acquisitions that continued across the following decades, she specified the fabric in terms that the designers and dressmakers she worked with understood were not negotiable. The wrong fabric in the right silhouette was still the wrong dress.
The fabric was not a detail. It was the substance of the thing. The luxury was not the price. French silk of the quality she required was expensive, but the expense was the consequence of the quality, rather than the point of it. The point was the material itself, the specific quality of a specific thing done correctly, which was what she had been seeking in every domain since she was 20 years old.
Fact four, a properly made cup of coffee. She sourced it through French channels. The coffee that Jacqueline Kennedy drank across her adult life was coffee she had arranged to have at the correct quality standard, regardless of the institutional context she was in. She had learned what properly made coffee was in Paris, where the specific preparation and the specific quality of the thing were treated as matters of genuine importance, >> >> and she had found the American default inadequate by comparison, and had
arranged her circumstances to avoid it. In the White House, the official catering coffee was not what she was drinking. The private residence had its own coffee preparation arranged to her specification, producing what she considered adequate. >> >> She had organized this not as a statement about the institutional standard, but as the practical maintenance of the specific quality she had decided was worth maintaining.
She kept sources for properly made coffee in every significant domestic context she inhabited across the following decades. The apartment had the specific beans and the specific equipment. The vineyard house was provisioned accordingly. She did not accept the default because the default was available.
She arranged for what she wanted because the alternative was accepting inadequacy >> >> in something she found genuinely pleasurable, and that the effort of maintaining at the right standard was modest. >> >> She drank one cup in the morning with the complete attention of someone drinking something they had taken care to have correctly.
That attention was the real luxury, the specific pleasure of the right thing done right. Fact five. High quality dark chocolate. She kept it in every residence. The dark chocolate that Jacqueline Kennedy maintained in her apartment across the years of the New York life was one of the most straightforwardly personal luxury items in her domestic inventory.
Not a status object, not an investment, not a piece she had acquired through the private channels for reasons of art historical significance. Simply something she loved and kept because she loved it. She kept the specific quality she had determined was the correct quality. The high cocoa content dark chocolate of the French tradition with a minimum of sugar and a maximum of the actual flavor of the thing, not the confectionery version that the American culture offered in abundance, but the version that bore the same relationship to the
confectionery version as properly made cassoulet bore to its American approximation. The household staff in different residences across different decades described finding the chocolate in the same general location across different kitchens, >> >> not displayed, not featured, simply present as one of the unremarkable facts of the daily domestic inventory.
She kept it because she liked it. She kept the correct version because she had no interest in keeping the incorrect one. The pleasure was specific to the quality. The luxury was not the price, which was moderate. It was the specificity, the decision to identify exactly what you wanted and maintain access to exactly that rather than accepting the available approximation.
She applied this principle to the chocolate the same way she applied it to the coffee and the silk and the fragrance. The thing should be what it should be. She arranged for it to be. >> >> Fact six, properly sourced French bread. She found specific bakeries in every city. The bread that Jacqueline Kennedy wanted was French bread made correctly, >> >> and she had been specific about this preference since her year in Paris had established for her permanently and precisely what bread was when it was
done right. The specific quality of a properly made baguette, the crust, the crumb, the flavor that the slow fermentation produced was the standard, and the American default was not the standard. She found the bakeries that met the standard in every domestic context she inhabited. In New York, she identified the specific establishments that produced bread she considered worth eating, and she maintained the relationships with those bakeries that the finding required.
On Martha’s Vineyard, she found the equivalent. In Paris, she knew exactly where to go. The finding was is casual. It required the attention of someone who took the quality of a daily staple seriously enough to search for the correct version rather than accept the adequate one. She had decided that bread was not a background element of the daily food.
It was a specific and important thing that deserved to be what it should be. The friends who dined with her in the private contexts where the bread was hers to select described the specific quality of a meal where the bread was genuinely good, the way it changed everything else on the table, the way it elevated the simplest food by being the right accompaniment to it.
She had understood this from the Paris bistros of her student year and she had maintained the understanding for 40 years. Fact seven, fine writing paper. She sourced it specifically and it was always the same weight. The letters Jacqueline Kennedy wrote across her adult life were written on paper that was as specific to her as any other element of her personal presentation, not the institutional stationery of the offices she occupied, the White House stationery, >> >> the Doubleday letterhead, but her
personal stationery sourced to a specific quality standard and maintained through the specific channels that supplied it. The paper was the right weight. Not the flimsy paper of the commercial stationery supply, but something with the specific substance that a letter written on it required, that communicated through the physical quality of the object the seriousness with which the writing had been undertaken.
She had felt this difference in Paris where the stationery departments of the great Paris shops treated paper with the seriousness the French tradition brought to every material question and she had maintained the standard ever since. The people who received her letters kept them not only for their content but as objects, specific physical things that had the quality of objects made with intention rather than produced for expedience.
The paper was part of this. The handwriting on the paper was part of this. The combination of the right material and the right words produced something that the recipients recognized as a different category from the ordinary letter. She had been choosing the right paper since she was a young woman who had understood that the quality of the material expressed the quality of the intention.
>> >> She maintained the choice because the understanding remained correct. Fact eight, antique French furniture of specific periods. She could date it across the room. The French furniture that Jackie Kennedy had been studying, acquiring, and living with since her Paris year was the most significant category of luxury object in her collection and the one she knew most deeply.
She had studied the field with the seriousness of a professional and by the time she was directing the White House restoration, she was engaging with the curators and museum specialists she had assembled as a peer rather than as a patron. She could date a piece of French furniture from across the room, not approximately, specifically from the proportions and the specific details of the construction that each period and each maître ébéniste had produced.
The Louis the XV pieces with their curved lines and the specific quality of the ormolu mounts. The Louis the XVI pieces with the return to the classical straight line and the medallion back. The Empire period that followed Napoleon’s taste for the monumental. She had studied them until the differences were immediately legible.
The pieces she acquired across her adult life were acquired with this knowledge informing every purchase. She was not buying antique French furniture as a category. >> >> She was acquiring specific pieces she had identified as genuinely significant, correctly attributed, in condition that warranted the acquisition.
The luxury was not the price, though the pieces were expensive. The luxury was the knowledge, the 40 years of looking and learning and handling that had produced the specific intelligence she brought to each acquisition. She had paid for the knowledge with time rather than money and the knowledge was the foundation everything else was built on.
Fact nine, fresh flowers in the private rooms, specifically and always. The flowers that Jacqueline Kennedy maintained in the private rooms of her various residences were one of the most consistently noted features of those residences by the people who visited them. Not the elaborate arrangements of the official White House rooms.
Those were institutional productions managed by the floral staff >> >> according to the requirements of the building’s public function. The private flowers were different, simpler, more personal, changed frequently, and present in the specific rooms where she actually lived rather than in the rooms that were maintained for public appearances.
She had strong preferences about the specific flowers. >> >> She favored white and cream and pale colors. The flowers that worked with the light and the color palette she had established in the private spaces rather than against them. She favored the specific flowers that had their own fragrance rather than those that were purely visual.
The gardenia, the lily of the valley, the white tuberose, the flowers whose presence in a room was registered by the nose as well as the eye. The flowers were changed before they declined. She did not maintain flowers past the point where they were in their full condition. The declining flower was not the flower she wanted in the room.
She had applied the same principle to flowers that she applied to everything in the physical environment she inhabited. The thing should be what it should be and the thing that is no longer what it should be should be replaced by what is. The luxury was not the cost of the flowers. It was the specific attention to the specific quality of the physical world around her.
The daily maintenance of an environment that met the standard she had set for what the environment should be. Fact 10, Egyptian antiquities. She acquired them through private channels for decades. The Egyptian antiquities that Jackie Kennedy had been acquiring since the 1980s were one of the less documented categories of her collection >> >> and one of the most personally significant.
She had developed through the sustained scholarly engagement with Egyptian archaeology that marked the later decades of her life the knowledge required to acquire in this field with genuine intelligence rather than the enthusiasm of a wealthy collector buying category. She knew what she was looking at.
She had studied the specific periods, the specific dynasties, the specific materials and techniques that the ancient Egyptian craftsmen had used and that the trained eye could use to assess authenticity and significance. She had the training because she had done the study and the studying had been serious. The pieces she acquired through the private channels she maintained were chosen with the specific eye of someone who had been in the field literally on the archaeological sites working alongside scholars who described her engagement as
genuine rather than performative. She had earned the acquisitions through the knowledge that made them possible. The luxury was the knowledge as much as the objects. She had arrived in the last decade of her life at the collector’s fullest expression of the practice. The knowledge so deep that the objects were encountered on their own terms, understood in their original context, acquired because the understanding was present rather than despite its absence.
Fact 11, the right hotel rooms in Paris. She had specific requirements and they never changed. The Paris hotels where Jacqueline Kennedy stayed across the decades of her adult life were selected with the same specificity she brought to every other luxury choice. >> >> She knew what she wanted.
She had identified who provided it and she maintained the relationship with the provider rather than exploring alternatives that offered no improvement over what she had already found. The requirements were specific and consistent. The view mattered. She wanted the specific quality of Paris light coming through the specific window that faced the specific direction she had determined was correct for the specific room she was in.
The silence mattered. Paris is a city of variable acoustics and she had identified the locations that produced the specific quality of urban quiet that she found restorative. The service was required to understand what she needed without requiring it to be explained repeatedly.
She had the habit, shared by many people who travel frequently to a city they genuinely love, of knowing the city better from the specific residential perspective of the regular visitor than most residents know it from the perspective of living there. She had been going to Paris since she was 20 and she had been paying attention at the same level she paid attention to everything else she found worth understanding.
The Paris hotel room at the right quality with the right light was one of the specific and non-negotiable pleasures of the returning visits. She had found it. She kept it. She returned to it. Fact 12. The Martha’s Vineyard landscape. She had it designed like a luxury object. The property at Gay Head on Martha’s Vineyard that Jacqueline Kennedy acquired and built on in the 1980s was in its relationship to the natural landscape >> >> one of the most personally expressive luxury items she ever produced.
She had always understood that the landscape around a building was as significant as the building itself that the views from the windows, the paths through the property, the relationship between the cultivated and the natural were as much a part of the designed environment as anything inside the structure.
She worked with the landscape designer on the Vineyard property with the same quality of informed direction she brought to every other design collaboration. The specific orientation of the planting relative to the sea views, the specific quality of the path that led from the house to the water, the relationship between the built environment and the landscape it occupied, not the landscape shaped entirely to human use, but the landscape engaged with in the way that respects what it already is while making room for what the human use
requires. She swam from the property, >> >> walked it, rode horses in the surrounding land. The landscape was not background to the house. The house was the shelter from which the landscape was engaged with. She had designed the relationship between the two as deliberately as she had designed anything in her life and the result was the physical environment she had been working toward since she first understood since Paris at 20 that the world you live in is either expressing who you are or it is not. The
Vineyard landscape expressed exactly who she was. Fact 13. Cashmere of the specific quality >> >> she had found in Scotland. She ordered it directly. Among the specific material luxuries that Jacqueline Kennedy maintained across the decades of the post-White House life, the cashmere she wore in the private and informal context, the sweaters and the wrap she wore at the vineyard in the autumn, the pieces she had for the private evenings, was cashmere of the specific quality that she had identified as the correct
quality, >> >> and that she sourced through the specific channels she had found provided it. Scottish cashmere from the specific mills she had identified in the specific weights she found most useful, in the colors she actually wore the pale neutrals >> >> and the occasional soft color that worked within the palette she had maintained since the White House years.
She ordered directly when the relationships she had established permitted direct ordering or through the London and New York channels that served as intermediaries for the specific establishments she preferred. The luxury was the material itself. >> >> Cashmere done correctly, the specific softness, the specific warmth, the specific way it maintained its quality across years of wearing and washing when the quality was genuinely there to begin with, was one of the physical pleasures she had been maintaining
since she could afford to maintain it. She wore the pieces until they wore out. The wearing out took years when the quality was what she required. The long life of the well-made piece was its own form of luxury. The pleasure extended across time rather than consumed quickly and replaced. Fact 14. Long uninterrupted hours with a book.
She treated this as a luxury she fought for. Among the items on the list of things Jacqueline Kennedy genuinely valued and actively maintained in her life, one was not an object at all. It was the long uninterrupted hour or two hours or three with a book she was deeply engaged in in a place where nothing was required of her and the reading was the only thing happening. She fought for this.
The White House years had been the period of her life when it was most difficult to find and most necessary to have and she had built it into the daily structure wherever the structure permitted the early mornings before the official schedule began, the late nights after the state dinners, the quiet weekends at Glen Ora, she had protected the reading time with the same force she protected every other private necessity.
After the White House years, the fight became easier as the official obligations reduced, but the specific luxury of the long uninterrupted reading hour was something she continued to actively protect rather than simply enjoy. She declined social invitations that would have consumed the reading time when the invitation was not worth the cost.
She organized the daily schedule around the preservation of the space for it. She said late in her life that the hours she had spent reading across her adult life were among the best hours she had lived. She meant it as a plain description of experience rather than as a preference statement. The reading was where a significant portion of who she actually was had been formed >> >> and was continuing to be formed.
The hours for it were the most personal luxury she maintained. >> >> Fact 15, the private table, a well-made simple meal with one or two people she actually loved. Every luxury on this list was genuinely hers, specifically chosen, specifically valued, maintained across decades for reasons that were accurate to her actual character rather than performed for any audience.
The most personal of all of them was not an object. It was the private table, the dinner for two or three people she genuinely wanted to be with in the apartment or on the vineyard where the food was simple and good and no one was performing and the conversation was what it actually was rather than what the occasion required it to be.
She had given thousands of meals in her adult life. The state dinners and the diplomatic luncheons and the official functions had been among the finest official meals served in the second half of the 20th century. They were professional events. They were not what she valued. What she valued was the small table.
The meal she had not organized as a diplomatic event but as an expression of the specific pleasure she took in the company of the people she actually loved, the French onion soup when she wanted French onion soup, the hamburger if that was what the evening required, the good bread and the good wine and the conversation that was possible only with the specific people she had let close enough to have it with.
She had organized her life in the decades after Dallas toward the increasing presence of the private table and the decreasing presence of everything else. The private table was what the life was for. Everything else, the beautiful clothes, the right fragrance, the correct paper, the vineyard house designed toward the water was the frame.
The dinner with one or two people she loved was the painting. If this video gave you something to think about, leave a like and subscribe. There is always more to the story. There’s always more to the story. There’s always more to the story. There’s always
