Most media commemorations of the fifty year anniversary of the Kennedy assassination were ripe with sentimentality. Cathy Horyn’s essay in the Times about the skirt suit Jacqueline Kennedy was wearing that day stood out because it was both dispassionate and poignant. Why is the suit such a brilliant icon? Photos of the striped button-down JPress shirt the president was wearing when he died have been published repeatedly. It’s a gruesome artifact, caked with blood and clipped neatly where the bullet entered and exited his chest. But this garment lacks the mythological charge, both the glamor and the horror, of the First Lady’s pink wool boucle suit. In the iconic black and white AP photograph of Lyndon B. Johnson taking the oath of office aboard Air Force One, we see see her only from the side and only from the waist up. But we know that she’s wearing bubble gum pink, and that the front of her skirt is stained with blood.
Much is made about Jackie’s White House fashions, but what she wore was conventional, not so different from what other women of her station were wearing. The pink suit isn’t even a real Chanel, but an authorized knock-off from a Park Avenue dress shop called Chez Ninon. Perhaps Mrs. Kennedy’s conservatism is what’s most remarkable about her presence in photographs of the assassination; she dresses and behaves absolutely appropriately right through the tragedy. It’s as if her style is guided by a deep unchanging sense of order, and that this is what holds her together. Mrs. Kennedy never cleaned the suit. Eight months after the assassination she had it sent, along with her shirt, stockings and handbag, to the National Archives in Potomac. The items are still there today, sealed in an airtight container, available only to researchers. At the request of her daughter Caroline Kennedy the suit won’t be displayed publicly until 2103. Besides being tasteless, a bit of assassination porn, showing it isn’t necessary. We all already know it.