“Apart from Jackie Kennedy, Michelle Obama and I guess Dolley Madison, Mrs. Reagan was the only president’s wife who had an interest in American fashion,” said Valerie Steele, the director of the Museum at FIT, on Sunday night at the Givenchy show here, “and was actually good at it.”
Nancy Reagan, the former first lady, who died Sunday at the age of 94, was a figure of some note among those who gathered a few hours later at the last of the day’s fashion shows. Among political wives, few have been as favorably inclined toward fashion and its designers, whom she championed and befriended, and whose profile she raised during her time in the White House.
Mrs. Reagan was a glamorous figure, albeit in a strenuously proper style, who favored the American designers of her 1980s heyday, like James Galanos, whose gowns she wore to both of her husband’s inaugural balls; Bill Blass; Oscar de la Renta, and Adolfo.
“It’s important to remember the context,” said Hamish Bowles, the international editor at large of Vogue, who moments earlier had been reading Mrs. Reagan’s obituary on his smartphone. “Mrs. Carter had just been in the White House, with her homespun ethos and handmade clothes. You couldn’t have had more of a contrast with a woman who embraced high fashion and counted many designers among her intimates.”
She had a deep appreciation for fashion. After seeing selections from her wardrobe at the Reagan Library, Mr. Bowles said, he found it “striking and a little touching how much the clothes meant to her.”
Mrs. Reagan’s signature was the color red, especially for her Adolfo suits, the most notable of which she wore to her husband’s swearing-in ceremony in 1981.
“If you think of red as a power color,” said Cindi Leive, the editor of Glamour, “you track that back to Nancy Reagan.”
In fact, Dr. Steele said, “I suspect she was influential in making red the Republican color.” (That’s a bold pronouncement, but it’s not an impossibility. As The Washington Post has tracked, red did not reliably stand for Republicanism, at least as far as “red states” are concerned on TV broadcasts, until the early 1990s, and was not the beyond-doubt standard until the election of 2000 at the earliest. And in much of the world, red remains the color of politics on the left, not the right.)
The occasion set some to reflecting on the fashions of her time.
“My favorite fashion moments with Nancy Reagan were Jimmy Galanos,” said Glenda Bailey, the editor of Harper’s Bazaar. “We see a lot of his influence, and I think we’re going to see a lot more: those big shoulders and the sequins.”
By MATTHEW SCHNEIER
Source New York Times
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