She left the White House with two children, a name the entire world knew, >> >> and 30 years of life ahead of her that she was going to have to build from the beginning. The shopping she did in those 30 years was not the shopping of the first lady managing a diplomatic wardrobe.
It was something more personal than that, the slow, deliberate, entirely private acquisition of the physical world she was building for herself piece by piece in the spaces between the public image and the private life. The clothes shifted. The objects multiplied. The houses filled with things she had found and chosen for no purpose except that she had wanted them.
She spent a lot of money. She spent it in ways that were entirely her own, and she kept almost all of it completely private. Here are 15 weird facts about how Jackie Kennedy shopped after Dallas, what she was building, >> >> and what it reveals about the woman doing the building. Fact one, her shopping habits changed fundamentally.
Within 6 months >> >> of leaving the White House, the wardrobe that Jacqueline Kennedy had maintained across 3 years of the Kennedy administration was a professional tool engineered to specific requirements, deployed strategically, >> >> managed within a system that tracked every piece against the anti-repetition rule and the photographic record.
>> >> She had dressed for the role. The role was over. Within 6 months of leaving the White House in December of 1963, the character of her acquisition had changed in ways that the people who worked with her and observed her closely described as striking. She was no longer selecting for the official occasion.
She was selecting for a life whose requirements were different and whose audience, for the first time in 3 years, was primarily herself. The pieces she began acquiring in the New York years were simpler in silhouette, >> >> more personal in character, less engineered for the specific demands of television and press photography and diplomatic function.
They were clothes for a person rather than clothes for a role. She was buying differently because she was living differently, and the living differently had freed the buying from the constraints that had shaped it across the White House years. The shift was not dramatic or sudden. She did not immediately abandon everything the official wardrobe had been, but the direction of the change was consistent from the beginning of the New York years, toward the more personal, the more private, the more genuinely hers. She had been dressing
for the world. She was beginning to dress for herself. Fact two. She spent money at a rate that alarmed the Kennedy family advisers, and she did not adjust it. The financial resources available to Jacqueline Kennedy in the immediate post-assassination period were, by any reasonable standard, substantial.
She received a widow’s portion from the Kennedy trust, a congressional pension for presidential widows, and various other provisions that gave her a secure financial position. By the standard of most human beings, she was wealthy. By the standard she had come from, and by the standard of the life she was living, the resources were sometimes in tension with the expenditure.
She spent money. She spent it in the categories that had always defined her spending, the clothes, the objects, the antiques, the art, and she spent it at a rate that the Kennedy family advisers, who monitored the family’s financial interests, found alarming enough to communicate their alarm through the appropriate channels.
The communication was received. The rate of spending did not substantially change. She had decided what she needed for the life she was building, and she was acquiring it. The Kennedy family’s financial concerns were real, and they were communicated, and they were, by her assessment, not sufficient grounds for revising the decision she had made about what the building required.
She had been living within other people’s financial frameworks for most of her adult life. She was managing the tension between what she wanted and what was available with the same practical ingenuity she had always applied to that specific tension. The alarm from the advisers >> >> and the continued spending were both documented features of the post-assassination years.
She managed the tension between them for several years until the Onassis marriage provided a financial context in which the tension was significantly reduced. Fact three. She used the Onassis years to make purchases she had been unable to make before. The marriage to Aristotle Onassis in October of 1968 changed Jackie Kennedy’s financial situation in ways that had direct and immediate consequences for the acquisitions she had been deferring.
Onassis was among the wealthiest men in the world. The resources available within the marriage, while never unconditional and always complicated by the specific dynamics of the relationship, were of a different order from what had been available before. She used the access, not extravagantly, not in the way that wealthy men’s wives sometimes use wealth as pure consumption.
She had never been that kind of acquirer, and the aesthetic intelligence that governed her purchasing had not changed with the availability of larger resources. But she pursued, during the Onassis years, >> >> pieces and objects and acquisitions that the previous decades financial constraints had placed beyond reach. The antiques that had been on the long list, the period pieces she had identified and wanted, and not yet been able to justify at the asking price.
The specific art that had been too expensive for the post-White House budget. The Paris acquisitions that the Onassis connection made both financially possible and logistically accessible in new ways. She was acquiring with the same eye she had always had and a significantly larger purse than she had previously been working from.
The Onassis years were personally complicated in ways that her biographers have documented fully. They were also, from the acquisition perspective, the period in which the physical world she had been building received its most significant expansion. She was not happy in the marriage. She was productive in the collection.
Fact four. She continued shopping the Paris markets on every trip abroad for the rest of her life. The Marché aux Puces in Paris, the vast flea market at Saint-Ouen, had been one of her preferred shopping environments since her student years in the city. >> >> And it remained so across the following four decades.
Every trip to Paris that the post-White House years and the Onassis years and the later Doubleday years provided included, if the logistics permitted, time at the market. She went with the same preparation she had always brought to it. Research done in advance, a specific sense of what she was looking for rather than an openness to browse.
The trained eye that could identify quality in the specific conditions of the market. >> >> The poor lighting, the density of the inventory, the price signals that were different from the formal dealer gallery signals, >> >> and required a different calibration. The anonymity management evolved across the decades.
In the earlier post-White House years, when her image was at its most saturated in the public consciousness, the management was more elaborate. >> >> The sunglasses, the small trusted group, the quick movement through the relevant stalls. >> >> In the later years, as the image settled into a different relationship with the public, the management was somewhat simpler without ever becoming unnecessary.
The pieces she found at the market were, in the accounts of people who knew her collection well, >> >> among the most personally significant in the collection, not the most valuable. The one she had found with her own eye, in the conditions she preferred. On the specific afternoons when the looking had produced the discovery, the market was where the acquisition was purely hers.
No intermediaries, no institutional channels. Just the eye and the object and the decision. Fact five. She developed a serious and private interest in Egyptian archaeology that led to significant acquisitions. >> >> In the later years of her life, primarily from the mid-1980s onward, Jacqueline Kennedy developed an engagement with Egyptian archaeology that went well beyond the enthusiast’s interest and into the territory of genuine scholarly engagement.
She studied the subject with the seriousness she brought to everything she found worth understanding properly. She traveled to Egypt multiple times. She worked with scholars who described her knowledge of the field as that of a serious student rather than a wealthy patron. The acquisitions that accompanied this engagement were significant and were made through the private channels she had always used for acquisitions she preferred to keep out of the public record.
Egyptian antiquities, objects that connected to the field she was studying, that were acquired with the eye of someone who understood what she was looking at rather than the eye of someone buying category, were added to the collection across those years. The acquisitions were private in the multiple senses that her acquisitions were always private.
>> The channels were discreet, the pieces were not publicly displayed, and she did not discuss the collection in any interview or public forum that would have produced a record of what she had. The collection she had built by the end of her life in the Egyptian domain specifically was substantially unknown to the public and known even to the people close to her only in general terms.
The scholarly engagement and the collecting engagement fed each other in the way that genuine collecting and genuine knowledge always feed each other. The knowledge produced the ability to identify what was worth acquiring and the acquiring deepened the engagement with the knowledge. She had arrived in her 60s at the collector’s fullest expression of the practice.
Fact six, she built the Martha’s Vineyard house from scratch and it was the most personal purchase of her post-Dallas life. The property she acquired on the Gay Head cliffs of Martha’s Vineyard in the 1980s and the house she built on it were not a purchase in the conventional sense. They were the most extended and most personal acquisition of the 30 years after Dallas the specific physical expression finally and completely of what she had always wanted a place to be.
She had never fully controlled the physical environments she had inhabited before. The houses of childhood had been her family’s and then her stepfathers. The White House had been the nation’s, the Georgetown house and the Virginia properties had been Kennedy family or rental properties. The Onassis properties had been his, and the specific character of living in spaces organized around another person’s requirements was not the freedom she had been building toward.
The vineyard property was entirely hers. She chose the land for its specific relationship to the landscape and the water. She worked with an architect she trusted on a design that expressed her requirements rather than any other persons. She directed every element of the physical environment, the orientation of the building, the relationship between the interior spaces and the exterior landscape, the specific quality of light in the rooms she was going to actually live in.
The house was not extravagant in the way that wealth typically expresses itself architecturally. It was specific, precisely calibrated to the requirements of a person who had spent 40 years thinking carefully about what physical environments needed to be and who had finally been given the resources and the freedom to build one that met the full standard of that thinking. She swam from the property.
She rode horses nearby. She read on the porch. It was the most personal thing she had ever acquired. Fact seven. She used the book editing career to shop for ideas in ways that paralleled her object collecting. The career at Doubleday that Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis built and maintained from 1975 until her death in 1994 was, among its many dimensions, a form of intellectual collecting that ran parallel to the physical collecting she pursued through the antique markets and the dealers and the auction houses.
She acquired authors and projects >> >> with the same eye she brought to objects, the specific quality of attention that identified what was genuinely good from what was merely competent, the willingness to pursue what she found genuinely interesting rather than what the market suggested was commercially safe, the specific and independent judgment that did not defer to consensus about what mattered and what did not.
The books she acquired at Doubleday were, in several instances, books that other editors had passed on or that did not fit the conventional categories of what a major publishing house was supposed to be publishing. She published them because she had read them with her own eye and had found them worth publishing. The eye that had identified the period furniture worth acquiring at the Paris market was the same eye that identified the manuscript worth acquiring in the editorial meeting. She had one eye.
It served her in every domain she applied it to. The career was, in this sense, a form of shopping that she took as seriously as any other form shopping for the ideas and the voices and the visions she found worth bringing into the world. She paid with her professional attention and her institutional capital rather than with money, >> >> but the transaction was the same.
The identification of what was genuinely good, the decision to acquire it, the commitment to making it as good as it could be. Fact eight. She continued shopping for furniture and objects until very close to her death. The physical collecting that had been one of the defining practices of Jacqueline Kennedy’s adult life did not diminish in the final years.
The accounts from people close to her in the early 1990s, in the period before the cancer diagnosis in January of 1994, and the relatively rapid progression that followed it, describe a woman whose engagement with the acquisition of objects she loved had not slowed with age or health. She was still looking. She was still visiting the dealers and the auction house previews and the specific sources she had cultivated across 40 years of serious collecting.
The eye that had been forming since Paris was still the same eye. Still capable of identifying what was worth having from across a room, still interested in the specific quality of the best things in whatever category she was looking at. The pieces she acquired in her final years >> >> were integrated into the collection with the same attention to placement and relationship that she had always brought to the organization of her physical spaces.
Every object had a location and the location was considered. She was still editing the world around her, still making the physical environment as right as she could make it, >> >> still applying the aesthetic intelligence that had been the organizing principle of her relationship with the physical world since she was 20 years old in Paris.
The collection that the estate assessors encountered after her death in May of 1994 was the accumulation of 40 years of looking and selecting and acquiring, ending only when the life that had driven it ended. Fact nine. She gave away significant pieces to people she loved, and the giving was always personal.
The shopping that Jacqueline Kennedy did across the post-Dallas years produced a collection that was always, to some extent, in motion, not static, not accumulated and held, but flowing outward as well as inward as the specific pieces that were right for specific people became clear to her and were given.
The giving was as deliberate as the acquiring. She had found a piece, she understood what it was, she understood who it was right for. She gave it not in the performance of generosity, >> >> but in the specific expression of the relationship with the recipient that the piece embodied. The object was chosen for the person with the same intelligence she had applied to choosing it for herself.
The people who received pieces from her described the experience with the consistency of people who understood that what they had received was personal >> >> rather than incidental. She had thought about them when she had found the piece, or she had found the piece because she had been thinking about them. The acquisition and the giving were two movements of the same act of attention.
She had built a collection across 30 years. She had also been giving pieces away across 30 years, >> >> steadily and specifically. What the estate contained at the end of her life was what remained after four decades of collecting and four decades of giving the balance of a practice that had always been simultaneously about building something for herself and about the relationships through which the building expressed itself. Fact 10.
She refused to shop in contexts where her presence would become the event. The management of the shopping process, the system she had built to keep the transaction private, and the acquisition invisible until the piece arrived in the collection was maintained across the entire post-Dallas period with the same completeness it had been maintained during the White House years.
The fundamental challenge did not change. She was the most recognizable woman in America, and any shopping context she entered became immediately and completely a story about the shopping rather than a transaction. She had solved the problem during the White House years through the systems that brought the transaction to her rather than taking her to the transaction.
The dressmakers came to the apartment, the dealers brought pieces for consideration. >> >> The auction house previews were attended in the conditions that minimized observation. She had built the acquisition process into the private space before the result was presented to the public.
The post-Dallas years >> >> maintained the same systems with the same discipline. The Ron Galella problem. The paparazzi who pursued her through New York for decades made the casual shopping trip that most people in her financial position would have taken as unremarkable a logistical operation requir- careful management.
She managed it. The shopping happened. It happened in the context she had organized to make it happen privately. She had not stopped acquiring. She had organized the acquisition to proceed without the observation that her presence in any public commercial space would have generated. The result was the collection.
The process that produced the collection was invisible. Fact 11. Her spending on books was consistent across every period of her post- Dallas life. Among the categories of acquisition that defined to Jacqueline Kennedy’s post-Dallas shopping, books were the most consistent and the most continuous. >> >> She had been buying books since childhood.
She was buying books in the weeks before her death. The category never diminished and never required the elaborate privacy management that other categories required because book buying was something that could happen in the ordinary ways and in the ordinary places without producing the press event that her presence in a clothing store or a gallery or a furniture dealer would have produced. She went to bookstores.
She browsed. She bought. The specific bookstore she favored in New York, the small independent stores that had the inventory her specific interest required rather than the mass market selection of the larger stores became places she was recognized but where the recognition produced the quiet acknowledgement rather than the event.
She was a regular. Regular customers at bookstores are allowed to be regular customers rather than spectacles. The books she acquired across the post Dallas decades were organized along the intellectual map of her actual interests, the archaeology, the history, the specific periods and places she was reading about in the sustained and serious way she had always read.
The book collection she had built by the end of her life was the most complete physical record of where her mind had traveled across 40 years. She had been a book person since before anything else defined her publicly. The book buying continued after everything else changed. FACT 12. She maintained relationships with specific dealers for decades and the relationships were genuinely mutual.
The dealer relationships that Jackie Kennedy had built across the post Dallas years were not the transactional encounters of a wealthy buyer moving through a market. They were professional relationships of genuine duration and genuine mutuality relationships >> >> in which both parties understood the other well enough that the transaction had a different character from the standard encounter between buyer and seller.
The dealers who had known her for decades knew her eye. They knew what she was looking for and what she would decline and what would make her stop and look with the specific quality of attention that meant the piece was genuinely interesting to her. They brought things to her attention before they reached the general market when the things were right because they understood what was right for her well enough to make the judgment independently.
She in turn brought to the relationships the same quality of loyalty she brought to every other long-term relationship in her life. >> >> She stayed with the dealers who served her well. She communicated her requirements clearly enough that the service could be good and she treated the professional relationships with the respect that professional relationships of genuine quality deserve.
The dealers she worked with for decades across the New York years and the Vineyard years and the doubleday years described the relationships with the specificity of people describing something that had been genuinely good. She had been a difficult client in the best sense. Specific. Demanding.
Exactly clear about what she wanted and willing to decline anything that didn’t meet the standard. She had also been consistent, loyal, and genuinely engaged with the material in ways that made serving her interesting rather than merely lucrative. Fact 13. She had a specific protocol for deciding what was worth the price and she applied it without sentiment.
The decision-making process that Jackie Kennedy applied to the question of whether a specific piece was worth its asking price was not emotional and it was not influenced by the prestige of the source. A piece from a major auction house was evaluated on the same basis as a piece from the Paris flea market.
What was it actually worth? What was the asking price and did the relationship between the two justify the acquisition? She had the knowledge to make this assessment accurately in the specific categories she collected. The furniture periods she knew well enough to evaluate independently of the dealer’s description. >> >> The jewelry that she had been studying since the early 1950s.
The art that she had been looking at seriously across four decades of visiting museums and galleries and private collections. She was not dependent on the seller’s representation of what the piece was. She had her own judgment. She used it. This meant that she would decline pieces from prestigious sources if she assessed the asking price as exceeding the actual value, which she was willing to communicate without apology.
It also meant that she would pay a fair price for a piece from an informal source that her knowledge identified as significantly undervalued, which was the situation the Paris flea market produced when the eye and the training were good enough. She was not moved by the prestige of the selling context.
She was moved by the quality of the thing being sold. The assessment was always of the thing, conducted by the intelligence she had built for exactly that purpose. And the assessment was always honest. Even when honesty required declining something that the seller believed was worth more than she had determined it was. FACT 14.
The Onassis settlement gave her the financial freedom to shop on her own terms for the first time. When Aristotle Onassis died in March of 1975 and the settlement of his estate was eventually reached with his daughter Christina, the financial resources Jackie Kennedy received were the first resources in her adult life that were unconditionally and entirely her own.
Not the Kennedy family’s money, managed through trusts she did not control. Not the allocation within a marriage whose financial architecture was organized around another person’s interests. Her own money. Available for her own purposes without condition or account. She used the freedom deliberately. The Vineyard property was the most significant single use the land acquired.
The house designed and built to her specifications, the physical expression of the private life she had been working towards since Dallas. The Fifth Avenue apartment was enhanced with the pieces she had been identifying and waiting for the resources to acquire. The specific categories of collection that the previous decade’s financial constraints had held at arm’s length were pursued with the focus of someone who had been waiting for exactly this moment.
She was 55 years old when the settlement was reached. She had been acquiring carefully and creatively under constraint for the entire span of her adult life. The financial freedom that the settlement provided arrived at the moment in her life when she knew most clearly what she wanted and why she wanted it, and she applied the resources to the knowledge with the efficiency of a person who had been thinking about this for a long time.
The shopping in the years after the settlement was the most personally expressive shopping of her life. >> >> It was also the most private. She had the resources. She had the freedom. And she had the systems she had always had for keeping the acquisition entirely out of public view. >> >> The collection grew privately, on her own terms, exactly as she had intended.
Fact 15. Everything she acquired after Dallas was part of the same project, building a life that was genuinely hers. The shopping that Jacqueline Kennedy did across the 30 years after Dallas was not, at its deepest level, about the objects. It was about the construction of her physical world that expressed, accurately and completely, who she actually was, >> >> the woman whose aesthetic intelligence and whose genuine preferences and whose private self had spent 3 years in the most public household in America
managing the distance between the performance and the person, and who had left that household in December of 1963 with 30 years ahead of her that she was going to build on her own terms. Every piece in the collection she built in those 30 years was a decision she had made, not a decision the Kennedy family made for her, or the political operation made for her, or the social architecture of the first lady’s role required her to make.
A decision she made with the eye she had developed since Paris, on the basis of what she actually found beautiful and what she actually wanted in the physical world she inhabited. The clothes she bought in the post-Dallas years, moving steadily from the official wardrobe toward the private one, the furniture and the objects and the art, the books, the house on the vineyard, the career at Doubleday, which was its own form of acquisition, the collecting of ideas and voices she found worth publishing, the relationship she
maintained with the dealers who understood what she was looking for, the Paris flea market every time she was in the city. All of it was the same project. All of it was the building of a life that was real, private, entirely expressive of who she actually was, and protected, as everything she had ever valued had been protected from the observation and the documentation and the public accounting that her name attracted wherever it went.
She had built it. >> >> It was hers. It was the most important thing she had ever acquired. If this video gave you something to think about, leave a like and subscribe. There is always more to the story. End of script. Sorry. End of script. Sorry. End of script. Sorry. End
