The weddingOn 12 September 1953, Jacqueline Lee Bouvier married then Senator John Fitzgerald Kennedy at St. Mary's Roman Catholic Church in Newport, Rhode Island. More than 800 guests witnessed the ceremony. And thousands of onlookers watched it from outside the church. After their wedding ceremony, the couple spent one night at the Waldorf Astoria before departing for Acapulco, Mexico, where they had their honeymoon. After the marriage, she would become Jackie Kennedy, and less than 10 years later, she would become the wife of the 35th and the youngest president of USA, the most elegant First Lady in American history, and one of the greatest style icon in the 20th century.        The dressThe wedding dress worn by Jackie Kennedy was made of silk taffeta featuring a pleated bodice with portrait neckline, and a pouffant skirt embellished with ruffled florets and intricate scallop pintucks and tiny flowers of wax. The gown was designed by New York City-based African American designer named Ann Lowe, little known at the time. It took two months to craft, and used 50 kilos of ivory silk taffeta. Ten days before the wedding, however, the gown was unfortunately destroyed, along with nine other pieces that had been designated and created for the wedding part when Lowe’s Madison Avenue studio flooded, and she had to recreate everything from scratch.     The accessoriesJackie Kennedy wore an elaborate rose point lace veil with her wedding gown, and carried a bouquet consisted of gardenias and white and pink orchids. Her engagement ring was a 2.88-carat diamond and 2-carat emerald baguette ring set on gold designed by Van Cleef & Arpels.  Side note: In the decades after Jackie Kennedy's wedding, her wedding gown has become loved by many brides-to be as well as the general public, she herself, however, did not like it, a wedding gift from her future father-in-law, Joseph Kennedy, father of John Kennedy, and compared it to a lampshade, according to fashion historian Kimberly Chrisman-Campbell, author of the book The Way We Wed: A Global History of Wedding Fashion Kennedy, who thought that Joseph Kennedy wanted to use the wedding and the wedding gown to create an American royalty moment and really set up his son as the heir to the family dynasty. Ann Lowe, the designer who has created one of the most iconic and photographed wedding gowns of the 20 century, remained little known and died in poverty. In 2004, half century after Jackie Kennedy's wedding, and 10 years after her death, Marshall Field’s Department Store in Chicago commissioned Belgian artist Isabelle de Borchgrave and her collaborator Rita Brown to create a paper replica of Jacqueline Kennedy’s wedding gown, as seen below, for more information about the creation, please visit JFK library.  Paper replica of Jackie Kennedy wedding dress 1953 designed by Ann Lowe Further interest
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