Film, Fashion, and the 1960s by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Published: 2017-02-14T16:00:00+00:00

Contexts: Grace Kelly, Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy, and French and American Couture

Something of the same ambivalent attitudes embodied and reflected in Hollywood representations of French and American couture in the 1950s and early 1960s were evident in the clothing choices of key public figures in the United States who could afford to buy bespoke clothing of their choice, no matter where it was designed or made. In the wider culture, French couture was often represented as “classy” or adding “class” to the wearer, and two important American style icons of the period, Grace Kelly and Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy, shifted between “French” and “American” fashionable dress.

The elegant blonde model-turned-film-star Kelly’s star persona was closely associated with Americanness, from her role as an Eastern Quaker in High Noon (Fred Zimmerman, 1952) to wealthy East-Coast types in Rear Window (Alfred Hitchcock, 1954) and High Society (Charles Walters, 1956). On and off screen, her clothing was associated with a sophisticated simplicity that, like her, was presented to the public as quintessentially American. At the end of Rear Window, socialite Lise Fremont (Kelly) wears more casual clothes—slim denim jeans and leather loafer shoes—in order to show that she can fit in with the lifestyle of obsessive, truth-seeking, American photojournalist “Jeff” Jefferies (James Stewart).

Costume designer Edith Head commented on Kelly’s exceptional understanding of the role of clothing in films, and Kelly was certainly familiar with couture clothing. Indeed, during her love affair with the Russian American couturier and film costume designer Oleg Cassini, she wore a stunning Cassini gown when she accepted her Academy Award for The Country Girl (George Seaton, 1954). It is perhaps surprising that for her much publicized 1956 “fairytale” wedding or the “wedding of the century” to Monaco’s ruler Prince Rainier, she did not wear a couture gown, but entrusted looking her very best on that special occasion to the American film costume designer Helen Rose. Thereafter, however, as Princess of Monaco she patronized the couture houses of nearby Paris, especially the House of Dior, in part because, as she explained, she needed to dress to fit her new role.19

It was difficult to upstage Princess Grace, but part of the visual classiness of Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy, a Francophile proud of her Bouvier French heritage whose study year abroad in Paris overlapped with the making of An American in Paris, was her passion for Parisian couture.20 When she married into the wealthy Kennedy family in 1953 she wore a gown designed by Ann Lowe, an African American designer who ran a small custom salon in New York (but was not credited with the design at the time of the wedding), but after becoming Jacqueline Kennedy she could afford to wear clothes by the Parisian couturiers she so greatly admired, including Givenchy.21

During the campaign leading up to the November 1960 presidential election in the United States, in which her husband, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, was the Democratic candidate, however, she was criticized for both the cost of her wardrobe and the fact that she did not wear clothes created by American designers and made by American workers.

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