I was carting a group of middle-school girls somewhere, eavesdropping as is the parental prerogative, when one of them brought up the governor of Florida and his wife.
"Oh, you mean Shady Bird Johnson? Tacky O?" one of the girls cackled.
It's no secret that the aspirant first lady has been modeling herself as the revival of Camelot-era style. There are some parallels: Jackie Kennedy was a photographer for the Washington Times-Herald; Casey DeSantis was a television news anchor with WJXT in Jacksonville, FL. Both understood how political image-making could be; both chose to lean into an aspirationally moneyed, demure style rather than the dreary "good Republican cloth coat" Pat Nixon was shoved into or the unapologetic assertiveness of Hillary Clinton's Donna Karan dress.
If your husband is running for president and your job is to burnish his image, the perks of modeling oneself after Jackie O are obvious. Her style promises a return to decorum, evokes a young, vigorous, white family in the White House, calls back to an America untroubled by pesky things like civil rights or an awareness that we had an environment, much less that it was in trouble.
This raises an interesting question: When we look to dead style icons for inspiration, what are we rejecting in the present?
There's no shame in admiring the style of people who went before us -- heck, the Gap, those masters of "mundane product with brilliant marketing," launched a very successful campaign around dead people wearing khakis. There is, however, a risk of conflating archival inspiration with an uncritical embrace of archaic ideas.
Women's fashion provides two immediate examples of where this sort of thing can go south real fast. This newsletter has covered the problem with prairie dresses before, so I'll just leave this link as a refresher.
And in the name of brevity, I'll spare you all my manifesto on the racist, classist, misogynist semiotics of the "ladylike" style and how eagerly retailers and their fashion-press enablers push it on women any time there's a political pushback against equal rights for all. Just know that when I finally crack, five thousand words on the subject will pour forth like bees from a wicker man idol.
What I'm finding interesting -- and slightly unnerving -- is how the 1990s are now getting the Fashion Icon treatment. This fall, the dinosaurs of the fashion press are attempting to turn the late Carolyn Bessette Kennedy into a larger statement on taste, and it's honestly coming across as deeply reactionary. The NYT's Vanessa Friedman recently explained CBK's contemporary allure with "discretion in both dress and demeanor was its own kind of currency and everyone agreed on who did it best." And an excerpt from an upcoming book continues the myth-making:
Mr. Blahnik had commented on this almost austere disposition Carolyn maintained while shopping; she was often granted all access to his store, but she took only what she absolutely needed and would always try to pay; she was never “greedy or demanding” and had the true markings of a lady.
Emphasis mine. Stop for a minute and reflect on who benefits from pushing narratives around ladylike breeding and discretion as the ne plus ultra of morally correct comportment. The Washington Post's Rachel Tashjian goes even further, noting of CBK:
she found herself reluctantly flung into fame, like Princess Diana the decade before. And like Diana’s, too, her ensembles are something like tea leaves, hinting at inner thoughts she could or would not express.
Hands up, anyone who's mildly unnerved by the vestiges of the old-school media establishment embracing a silent, ladylike avatar in these, our volatile times.
And It's a little inaccurate to present CBK as some tastefully reticent, gently bred avatar of the American meritocracy. In a game-recognize-game piece, Cat Marnell once wrote:
Oh, you think Carolyn didn't want attention? You think she was so private? It's funny, then, that she dated so many celebrities -- Mr. Baywatch/Underpants, Allessandro Bennetton, future N.H.L. star John Cullen -- and then MARRIED the most famous bachelor in the world.
Papering over complicated truths is part and parcel of the icon-making process -- it's how we get books like The Gospel According to Coco Chanel (and need books like Mademoiselle: Coco Chanel and the Pulse of History) and a thousand memes with Marilyn Monroe's face and some misattribution about behaviors.
But this sort of icon-making process also permits its enthusiasts to flatten the abhorrent aspects of the times that we normalized and to amplify qualities that are meant to push back against the present -- like all that silent, ladylike restraint in an era of growing labor and social protest.
Edward Enningful, who made history as the first Black editor-in-chief of British Vogue, wrote in his memoir, "As a Black person, frankly I think it's weird and a bit masochistic to fetishise the past. Things haven't always been so great for us, to say the least. There may be plenty in this world that's frightening, but I never feel frightened about the future."
When we look at how politicians and their partners are shaping their images for public consumption, it's worth asking: Are they coming from a place of fear? Do they want their constituents to live in fear? And when they harken back to some flat image of the past, what story are they telling about the past? Is it true?
The silent flattening of someone's humanity as part of the process of creating an icon does a disservice to that person and to the ways in which we are encouraged to articulate the human experience. When we flatten the past, we flatten our own understanding of it, and how it shapes the present and future.
Perhaps the most radical style icons in 2023 and 2024 will be the ones who break out of the past and loudly embrace the joys of our uncertain, volatile, ambiguous, complicated times and possibilities.