by September is one of the most popular months for weddings and apparently, that also applies to wedding dress auctions.
The Valentino dress Jacqueline Kennedy wore for her wedding to Greek shipping tycoon Aristotle Onassis sold for more than three times its pre-sale estimate at Bonhams’ Classic Luxury: Icons of Style auction. The final bid at the sale, which ran from September 16 – 26, was $24,320.
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Five years after the murder of her first husband John, the 35-year-oldth The US president, Kennedy Onassis was married on the private island of Skorpios which he owned in the Aegean Sea. The two had known each other for several years before and got “very chummy” on Onassis’ yacht, “so chummy in fact that it left fellow vacationer Ted Kenny a bit stuck,” according to a 1968 WWD report. The 325-foot yacht was named “Christina O” for his daughter, which was transformed from a Canadian destroyer escort into a $3 million, 10-bedroom Jet Set carrier that required a crew of 50.
Kennedy’s mother Janet Auchincloss announced her daughter’s plans to marry a second time within a week of the wedding. Many Americans did not approve of her union, especially those who thought “she should remain the lily-white widow of a martyred President,” WWD once said.
A private couple who befriended Onassis and Onassis Kennedy on the tycoon’s private yacht offered the dress up to Bonhams. In October 1968, WWD reported that Kennedy Onassis wore the beige chiffon and lace dress to the wedding of Bunny Mellon’s daughter Eliza Lloyd and Viscount Moore, where Caroline Kennedy was the flower girl and John F. Kennedy, Jr. . a page boy. . The Italian designer made a new version of the same dress for the wedding in Greece.
Van Cleef & Arpels presented Kennedy with diamond and ruby earrings in 1968, which were the same earrings worn by Onassis’ longtime paramour Maria Callas the month before, according to WWD at the time.
Kennedy’s wedding to the billionaire Onassis increased her status as a millionaire and put her friends Bunny Mellon and Betsy Whitney in a tizzy, WWD reported in 1968. The former first lady was also said to be “tight on dollars before she met Onassis, ” according to her WWD obituary.
Marissa Speer, head of Bonhams handbags and fashion sales for the US, described the sale, which included one of John F. Kennedy Jr.’s tuxedos. as a “rare privilege”. She added, “The Canadians are without doubt one of the most remarkable families in modern American history. Jacqueline Kennedy’s 1968 couture ensemble is not only an important piece of fashion history, marking the emergence of one of the world’s most stylish women, but also represents an important design in Maison Valentino’s history.”
As for the final scores for items worn by JFK Jr., a Calvin Klein tuxedo sold for $2,560, a Calvin Klein suit and black tie sold for $2,560 and a Giorgio Armani overcoat, circa 1990, fetched $10,240.
Interestingly, Kennedy’s first wedding dress – an elaborate Anne Lowe ball gown with a fitted bodice that required 50 yards of fabric – was also in the news this week. Sony’s Tristar will show how the largely unknown Black designer Lowe came to design that historic wedding dress in a feature film called “The Dress.” The biopic will be based on Piper Huguley’s historical fiction book “According to His Own Design.”
Serena Williams and two-time Oscar-winning costume designer Ruth E. Carter will be handling the film’s production, with the latter also handling the costume designs.
A potential design consultant for the feature film, Katya Roelse, who created a replica of Lowe’s wedding dress for an exhibit at the Winterthur Museum, Garden and Library last fall, explained the differences between Kennedy’s two wedding dresses. For her first wedding in 1953, Kennedy’s soon-to-be father-in-law, Joe, liked “the optics of an American designer like Ann Lowe, JFK wanted something more traditional, and her mother [Janet Auchincloss] and stepfather [Hugh Auchincloss] he didn’t want to overpay,” Roelse said. “Ann Lowe managed the whole thing nicely and made a dress that fit and promoted her skills, but Jackie didn’t like it in the end. She wanted to please everyone.”
Roelse described Kennedy’s marriage to Onassis as “an act of independence” and a sign of her “wanting what she wanted: protection and comfort, despite how unpleasant he made her”.
She added, “It makes me think that she wore Valentino because it showed her maturity to please herself and take risks, by wearing an unconventional two-piece ensemble as a ‘dress’ by a designer who was not yet a household name. .”
Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis 1960s Style File From The Archives [PHOTOS]
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Launch Gallery: Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis 1960s Style File From The Archives [PHOTOS]
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