Jackie Kennedy Lilly Pulitzer dress: The untold story!

Overview

Jackie Kennedy Loved Lily Pulitzer. In fact, she went to school with the forever fashionista and was “school pals”. According to Vanity Fair, Lilly attended the same boarding school as Jackie, and tales about their connection have been mentioned by Pulitzer’s longtime friend Kathryn Livingston in her book Lilly: Palm Beach, Tropical Glamour, and the Birth of a Fashion Legend.

Livingston also wrote that the cotton shift and Pulitzer name gained a lot of attention and the promise and style of the young administration when both Jackie and her daughter Caroline were photographed in matching Lillys.

Details about Lily Pulitzer

Born in Roslyn, New York on 10th November 1931, Lillian Pulitzer Rousseau was a fashion designer, an entrepreneur and an American socialite. Her company Lily Pulitzer, Inc produces clothing featuring bright, colourful and floral prints. But before she entered the world of fashion, she briefly attended college.

During an interview with Vanity Fair, Pulitzer expressed how she couldn’t stand college as she felt like she didn’t have a career. So instead, she worked as a nurse’s aide in Kentucky and a veteran’s hospital in the Bronx to fill her free time after she dropped out from college.

She would ride a horse through the Kentucky hills, delivering medical supplies to mothers and newborn babies, Livingston wrote. Eventually, Lilly met Peter Pulitzer, who she eloped in 1952. They settled in Palm Beach, Florida after their marriage, where they owned several orange groves. She opened a fruit juice stand with the produce of the groves they owned and until that point in her life, Lily had never really cared about fashion.

Jackie Kennedy Lilly Pulitzer dress

The Origin of her company

Once, while working in her juice stand Pulitzer realised the mess in her clothes that was a result of squeezing juice. So in an attempt to camouflage the stains, she designed a bright and colourful cotton sleeveless shift dress which gained the attention and interest of her customers. So she decided to make more of those dresses to sell at her juice stand and sooner than she knew it, she was selling more dresses than juice. That is when she decided to shift her focus completely towards designing and selling what had become known as “Lillys”.

Lily became the president of her company around 1959. Their fabrics were produced by the Key West Hand Print Fabrics company and the factories were located in Miami, Florida.

The dress worn by Jackie is one of Lily’s most iconic and successful styles.

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