the editor

Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis is a style icon (if that phrase still means anything these days), but I never thought her as a personal source of inspiration, even though I've always thought she exemplfied a certain chic that's relevant even today. But her hats and suits just seemed a little fussy for me.

I've been very interested in her life as an editor at Doubleday ever since I read about the two autobiographies devoted to her tenure (she signed Michael Jackson's "Moonwalker"!), and bought a copy of the January issue of Vanity Fair to read the excerpt (and also because I love that Johnny Depp cover and interview).

The pictures (which I later found in Life magazine) that accompanied the story revealed a part of her sartorial life I hadn't paid attention to before - in the early eighties, her style as a career woman (a very wealthy one) was clean, practical chic and it hasn't seemed to date. When she wasn't doing that jet set glamour thing, she had the sort of throwaway elegance perfectly suited to her urban surroundings, and it looks perfectly modern even now.



I had seen her as one of those people from a bygone era known for her good taste, with a somewhat stiff, conservative sense of dress, but her later years were far more interesting than I realised, and as it turned out, so was her style.

Pictures from life