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Jackie answered with the famous comeback that to spend that much, "I would have to wear sable underwear." Yet in no time, Pat Nixon was telling reporters how she bought American designers and that she got them straight off the rack. Jack Kennedy was also courting the International Ladies Garment Workers' Union, whose powerful president, David Dubinsky, was cautioning J.F.K. that his wife had to buy American. Jackie could see what the press would make her into. She wrote in despair to a friend: "I refuse to be the Marie-Antoinette...of the 1960s."
Eventually she found her way to Oleg Cassini, a French-born Russian turned naturalized American and a onetime Hollywood costume designer. Cassini gave her Americanized versions of French designs, clean lined, in the bright, solid colors she preferred, but with oversize buttons and coat pockets that his Hollywood experience told him would stand out in photographs. She also patronized American clothiers who made licensed copies of French fashions. The red wool dress she wore for her television tour of the White House in 1962 was a line-for-line replica of a Marc Bohan dress for Dior. All the while, she continued to buy the occasional real thing from France. Even the pink suit she wore on the final day in Dallas, which is not in the show, was by Chanel.
Cassini, now 88, has complained that the Met show makes it appear that he slavishly copied French originals or took explicit directions from his famous client. But Jackie was plainly nobody's mannequin. She knew what she wanted, and she didn't hesitate to tell Cassini. In collaboration with dressmakers at Bergdorf Goodman, the New York City department store, she even designed her Inaugural ball gown. She had her snarky side too. "I imagine you will want to put some of my dresses in your collection," she once wrote to Cassini. "But I want all mine to be originals and no fat little women hopping around in the same dress." Her strict attention to what she wore doesn't really accord with her occasional insistence that she had "no desire to influence fashions--that is at the bottom of any list." Jackie got a good deal of what she wanted in life. But her wish to be irrelevant in the matter of style? It never happened. She never meant it to.