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Iconic look: Jackie Kennedy's wedding dress by Ann Lowe, 1953
"all crumpled up" — Caroline Kennedy, on finding her mother's wedding dress in a warehouse
12 September 1953. Newport, Rhode Island.
Jacqueline Bouvier married Senator John F. Kennedy in an ivory silk taffeta wedding dress by Ann Lowe, with a portrait neckline and a vast bouffant skirt. Jackie herself thought it looked like a lampshade.
The wedding
The ceremony took place on the morning of 12 September 1953 at St. Mary's Church in Newport. Archbishop Richard Cushing led the service.
More than 750 guests filled the church. Outside, a crowd of about 3,000 people waited to see the bride.
Then the couple rode to Hammersmith Farm, the estate of her mother, Janet Lee Auchincloss, and her stepfather, Hugh D. Auchincloss, above Narragansett Bay.
About 1,200 guests came to the reception. The couple danced their first dance to "I Married an Angel" and cut a five-tier wedding cake.
Late in the afternoon, they left under a shower of paper rose petals. They spent the night at the Waldorf Astoria in New York, then flew to Acapulco, Mexico, for their honeymoon.
Less than eight years later, the bride would become First Lady of the United States, and one of the great style icons of the 20th century.
The dress
The dress was made of ivory silk taffeta. It took 50 yards of fabric and more than two months of work.
The fitted bodice had a portrait neckline, wide and open across the shoulders. Below a narrow waist, the skirt swelled into a huge round bouffant shape.
The skirt was the showpiece. It was worked with interwoven bands of fine tucks, ruffled florets, and tiny flowers made of wax.
The designer was Ann Lowe, an African American dressmaker from Alabama. She had a salon in New York, and her clients included the Roosevelts, the Vanderbilts and the Rockefellers.
Jacqueline's mother, Janet Lee Auchincloss, chose her to make all fifteen dresses for the bridal party. Ann Lowe had already made Janet's own dress for her wedding to Hugh D. Auchincloss.
The bride had wanted something simpler, more French. But the Kennedy family wanted a traditional, romantic dress, and Joseph P. Kennedy, the groom's father, watched over the plans.
She gave in. Privately, she told friends that the portrait neckline did not flatter her slim figure, and that the skirt looked "like a lampshade."
The accessories
Her veil was an heirloom of rose point lace that had belonged to her grandmother. A small lace tiara and orange blossoms held it in her hair.
She wore a single strand of family pearls, a diamond leaf pin from Joseph P. Kennedy and his wife, Rose Kennedy, and a diamond bracelet that the groom gave her the evening before.
Her bouquet was of white and pink spray orchids and gardenias.
Her engagement ring was by Van Cleef & Arpels: a 2.88 carat diamond set beside a 2.84 carat emerald, with tapered baguettes.
The story
Ten days before the wedding, a pipe burst in Ann Lowe's workshop. Water ruined ten of the fifteen dresses, including the bride's.
She did not tell the Kennedys. She bought new fabric, hired extra seamstresses, and remade everything in time, work that had first taken about eight weeks.
The dresses arrived on time. Ann Lowe lost money on the order.
Most newspapers never printed her name. One of the most photographed wedding dresses of the 20th century was made by a designer the public did not know.
Ann Lowe died in 1981. Recognition came slowly, and mostly after her death.
The dress itself was nearly forgotten. Caroline Kennedy later said the family found it "all crumpled up" in a department store box in a warehouse.
Today it belongs to the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum in Boston. It was restored in 1997 and last shown in 2003, for what would have been the couple's 50th anniversary. It is now too fragile to display.
In 2004, Marshall Field's department store in Chicago ordered a replica of the dress, made entirely of paper. It was the work of the Belgian artist Isabelle de Borchgrave and her collaborator Rita Brown.
Isabelle de Borchgrave painted the paper to look like silk. Rita Brown folded, glued and stitched it into a dress, down to the 24-inch waist and the ruffled florets of the skirt. The store later gave it to the Kennedy Library.
The bride thought it looked like a lampshade. The world remembers it as the dress of an American princess.