Letizia Mowinckel, an American diplomat’s wife with a discerning eye for clothes who advised her friend Jacqueline Kennedy on her wardrobe and served as her fashion scout in Paris, procuring the pink Chanel suit that came to symbolize the first lady’s resolve in the wake of her husband’s assassination, died on Feb. 14 in Rome. She was 105.
Her death, at a retirement home, was confirmed by her son, John C. Mowinckel.
Mrs. Mowinckel and Mrs. Kennedy met at a party in Rome in 1954, and their lives casually intersected over the next several years as John F. Kennedy rose from U.S. senator to president in 1961. The next year, the Kennedys met the Mowinckels in Newport, R.I., for the America’s Cup race, and Mrs. Kennedy expressed admiration for a pair of pale green gabardine pants that Mrs. Mowinckel said she had bought at a steep discount.
Mrs. Mowinckel, then living in Paris, offered to have a pair or two made for the first lady.
Impressed by her friend’s style and thrift, Mrs. Kennedy enlisted Mrs. Mowinckel to obtain clothes discreetly from French designers and send them to the White House. During the election, the press had criticized the chic Mrs. Kennedy for favoring foreign designers. She chose the American designer Oleg Cassini, long known for his work with Hollywood stars, as her personal couturier during her husband’s presidency, but her taste for Parisian fashions was unabated.
At French fashion houses, the Italian-born Mrs. Mowinckel concocted an elaborate tale about a cousin of hers, a Sicilian princess forbidden by her husband to travel. The princess just happened to share Mrs. Kennedy’s coloring and measurements.
Her correspondence with Mrs. Kennedy was peppered with phrases about garments “your cousin would like” and items to “please order for your cousin.” They also alluded to a style rivalry between the first lady and her fashion-minded younger sister, Lee Radziwill.
“You will look early for me and try to get there before Lee,” Mrs. Kennedy wrote in one note.
At Chanel, Mrs. Mowinckel used the fib about her cousin to order a pink suit that would become one of the most memorable garments in American history. She chose it because the first lady “looked terrific in that shade of pink, with her Palm Beach suntan,” she said in a 2004 interview with Bergdorf Goodman magazine.
The suit took on a far greater significance in shaping the first lady’s legacy when she decided to wear it on a trip to Dallas with her husband on Nov. 22, 1963.
According to an account Mrs. Kennedy gave to the Kennedy presidential biographer William Manchester, her husband had asked her before the trip about her attire.
“There are going to be all these rich, Republican women at that lunch, wearing mink coats and diamond bracelets,” he told her, “and you’ve got to look as marvelous as any of them. Be simple — show these Texans what good taste really is.”
She settled on the strawberry-pink bouclé suit from Chanel, with a matching pink pillbox hat and a blue silk collar. She had worn the suit a few times before, including on a 1962 visit to London.
On that day in Dallas, the president and first lady sat next to each other in the rear seat of an open-top Lincoln convertible. Around 12:30 p.m., as the presidential motorcade passed through Dealey Plaza, shots rang out. The president was killed, and Mrs. Kennedy was soaked in his blood.
“I cast one last look over my shoulder and saw, in the president’s car, a bundle of pink, just like a drift of blossoms, lying in the back seat,” Lady Bird Johnson, the vice president’s wife who was several cars behind the Kennedys’, noted in an audio recollection made soon after the assassination.
Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson was sworn in aboard Air Force One just before it returned to Washington, and Mrs. Kennedy, who stood next to Mr. Johnson, refused to remove the suit. Mrs. Johnson recalled, “Then with something — if you can say a person that gentle, that dignified, had an element of fierceness — she said, ‘I want them to see what they have done to Jack.’”
Mrs. Kennedy kept the bloodstained suit on for more than 24 hours. When she finally took it off, it was not cleaned. It remains in a climate-controlled vault in the National Archives.
The last outfit Mrs. Mowinckel obtained for Mrs. Kennedy, in 1964, was a black Chanel suit for mourning.
Maria Letizia Crostarosa was born in Rome on Sept. 21, 1920, to Mario Crostarosa, a lawyer, and Noemi (Sciponi) Crostarosa, a researcher and translator at the Vatican library. She learned English from her nanny and later became proficient in Portuguese and French.
She studied law at the University of Rome, then met her future husband, John W. Mowinckel, a journalist for U.S. News and World Report who was stationed in the city after having done decorated service in the Marine Corps and the Office of Strategic Services, the U.S. spy agency during World War II. They married in 1947. Three years later, Mr. Mowinckel began a career in the Foreign Service, with stints in Rome, Paris, Kinshasa, Rio de Janeiro and Washington.
They frequently threw parties, including a 1954 fete in Rome which Mrs. Kennedy attended. “All jaws dropped” when she entered, Mrs. Mowinckel recalled, describing the then-senator’s wife as a “splendid unknown beautiful creature” who left several men at the party clamoring for an introduction.
In Washington, the couples lived nearby, and their friendship intensified after Mr. Kennedy won the presidency. On the triumphant 1961 trip to France where the president referred to himself as “the man who accompanied Jacqueline Kennedy to Paris,” Mr. Mowinckel served as the first lady’s press attaché.
Mr. Mowinckel, who retired in 1975 as minister and deputy chief of mission in Vienna, died in 2003. In addition to her son, Mrs. Mowinckel is survived by two grandchildren and three great-grandchildren.
Though she never played style adviser for anyone else but Mrs. Kennedy, Mrs. Mowinckel maintained her own streamlined elegance well into her 100s, even after she moved into a facility managed by nuns.
“They said when she first came to the retirement house that she was the best-dressed woman there,” her son said in an interview. In the mornings, her minders “put on her necklace and her earrings and wheeled her around.”
On the Saturday that she died, she had an appointment with the in-house hairdresser, who coifed her hair into short waves at least once a month. Afterward, she ate lunch and was put to bed.
“At least her hair was done,” her son said.
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