Where Is Jackie Kennedy’s Blood-Stained Pink Suit Worn In Dallas When President Kennedy Shot?
One of those questions that keeps being asked regarding the assassination of President Kennedy is where is Jackie Kennedy’s blood-stained pink suit that she wore that day in Dallas?
Preserved in a climate-controlled vault outside of Washington, the suit and its accessories, still stained with JFK’s blood, are being held by the National Archives under strict Kennedy family restrictions that it not be seen until at least 2103.
The National Archives has held the pink suit and Mrs Kennedy’s accessories, including navy shoes, bag and navy blouse, since 1964, when they arrived in a dress box accompanied by an unsigned note on the stationery of Mrs Kennedy’s mother, Janet Auchincloss.
The note simply stated: ‘Jackie’s suite and bag — worn November 22, 1963.’ The outfit’s matching pillbox hat and white kid gloves, lost in the day’s chaos, are missing, however.
‘It looks like it’s brand-new, except for the blood,’ senior archivist Steven Tilley, one of a handful of people to see the suit, told the Los Angeles Times.
The items — including a pair of blood-powdered stockings which were folded in a white towel — legally belonged to daughter Caroline Kennedy after Mrs Kennedy’s death in 1994, until a deed of gift was made in 2003 to the national Archives with the stipulation that the suit would not be seen for a least a century.
It was on the plane back to Washington, her pink suit caked with her husband’s blood, that Mrs Kennedy refused to change into a ‘something cleaner’.
According to William Manchester’s The Death Of A President, after one aide prompted ‘Why not change?’ Mrs Kennedy simply shook her head and said: ‘Let them see what they’ve done.’
After Mrs Kennedy returned to the White House on November 23, her suit and accessories were put into a bag, presumably by her personal maid, Providencia Paredes, and soon after placed in the dress box that arrived at the archives in 1964.
‘The single symbol of that event and of her as a persona is that pink suit,’ said Carl Sferrazza Anthony, a first ladies historian. ‘It’s all anyone need see and, in an instant, people know what it is in reference to.’
Made by Chez Ninon, a Park Avenue salon that created many of her clothes, the pink suit was modeled off a Chanel runway design.
To appear patriotic (by buying her garments from the US rather than France), the fabric, buttons and trim for the suit came from Chanel in Paris, but it was fitted for Mrs Kennedy at Chez Ninon using Chanel’s ‘line for line’ system, according to Justine Picardie’s 2010 authorized biography of Coco Chanel.
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