September is among the more popular months for weddings and apparently, that applies to wedding dress auctions too.
The Valentino dress that Jacqueline Kennedy owned and wore for her wedding to the Greek shipping tycoon Aristotle Onassis sold for more than triple the pre-sale estimate at Bonhams’ “Classic Luxury: Style Icons” auction. The final bid was $24,320 at the sale, which ran from Sept. 16 – 26.
Five years after the assassination of her first husband John, the 35th president of the U.S., Kennedy wed Onassis on the private island of Skorpios that he owned in the Aegean Sea. The pair had known eachother for a number of years before and they had become “very chummy” on Onassis’ yacht, “so chummy in fact that fellow vacationer Ted Kenny left somewhat in a huff,” 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 ship into a 10-bedroom Jet Set carrier to the tune of $3 million that required a crew of 50 people.
Kennedy’s mother Janet Auchincloss announced her daughter’s plans to wed a second time within a week of the nuptials. Their union was not well-received by many Americans, especially those who thought “she should stay the lily-white widow of a martyred President,” WWD once said.
A wedding dress belonging to Jackie Onassis from 1968 is displayed at the ‘Valentino: Master of Couture’ exhibition at Somerset House in London in 2012.
Peter Macdiarmid
The dress was offered up to Bonhams by a private couple that befriended Onassis and Onassis Kennedy on the tycoon’s private yacht. In October of 1968, WWD reported that Kennedy Onassis had worn the beige chiffon and lace dress to the wedding of Bunny Mellon’s daughter Eliza Lloyd and Viscount Moore, where Caroline Kennedy was a flower girl and John F. Kennedy, Jr. was a page boy. The Italian designer made a new version of the same dress for the wedding in Greece.
Onassis had presented Kennedy with diamond and ruby pendant earrings from Van Cleef & Arpels in 1968, which were the same earrings that Onassis’ longtime paramour Maria Callas had worn the month before, according to WWD at that time.
Kennedy’s wedding to the billionaire Onassis upped her status from millionaire and placed her in the echelons of her friends Bunny Mellon and Betsy Whitney, WWD reported in 1968. The former first lady was also said to be “tight with a dollar before meeting Onassis,” according to her WWD obituary.
Jackie Onassis and husband Aristotle Onassis in September 10, 1970 at Claridges Hotel in London.
WireImage
Marissa Speer, Bonhams head of sale for handbags and fashion for the U.S. described the sale, which included one of John F. Kennedy Jr.’s tuxedo as “a rare privilege.” She added, “The Kennedys are without question, one of the most prominent 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 most stylish women in the world, but it also showcases an important design in maison Valentino’s history.”
As for the final tallies for the JFK Jr.-worn belongings, a Calvin Klein tuxedo sold for $2,560, a Calvin Klein suit and black tie went for $2,560 and a Giorgio Armani overcoat, circa 1990, fetched $10,240.
A bridal portrait of Jacqueline Lee Bouvier in an Ann Lowe-designed wedding dress in 1953.
Getty Images
Interestingly, Kennedy’s first wedding dress – an elaborate Anne Lowe ballgown with a fitted bodice that required 50 yards of fabric – has also been in the news this week. Sony’s Tristar will highlight how the largely unheralded Black designer Lowe came to design that historic wedding gown in a feature film entitled “The Dress.” The biopic will be based on Piper Huguley’s historical fiction book “By Her Own Design.”
Serena Williams and two-time Oscar winning costume designer Ruth E. Carter will be pitching in with producing the film, and the latter will be handling the costume designs too.
A potential design consultant for the feature film, Katya Roelse, who created a replica of Lowe’s wedding gown for an exhibition at the Winterthur Museum, Garden and Library last fall, explained the differences between Kennedy’s two wedding dresses. For her first nuptials 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] didn’t want to pay too much,” Roelse said. “Ann Lowe deftly managed it all and made a gown that was suitable and a tour de force of her skills, but one that Jackie ultimately didn’t like. She was trying to please everyone.”
Roelse described Kennedy’s marriage to Onassis as “an act of independence” and a sign of her “asking for what she wanted: protection and comfort, despite how unpopular it made her.”
She added, “It makes me think she wore Valentino because it demonstrated her maturity to please herself and take somewhat of a risk, by wearing an unconventional two-piece ensemble as her ‘gown’ by a designer who was not quite yet a household name.”