Wedding dresses have a way of fixing themselves in the American mind. Carolyn Bessette’s dress for her wedding to John F. Kennedy Jr. cemented minimalism as the ultimate ’90s fashion statement, and even the cupcake frock worn by Princess Diana — perhaps the most American of British royals — made the world’s biggest democracy fall in love with a monarchical fairy tale.
But even within the fashion world, the story behind the dress Jacqueline Bouvier wore to wed John F. Kennedy in 1953 is strangely unknown. The designer of the dress — simple and feminine, with charming pinwheels of white silk — went uncredited at the time. In 1961, a reporter for the Ladies’ Home Journal profiling the first lady described her wedding gown in glowing detail, but referred to its maker as “a colored woman dress maker, not the haute couture.”
Read more at the Washington Post.