I was catching up on my favorite blogs this morning, and headlessness linked me to First Ladies, a collection painted by Tina Mion. It is an interesting and beautifully rendered series, but one picture in particular Stop Action Reaction, a painting of Jacqueline Kennedy, truly affected me.

In the portrait, she is shown holding a king of hearts playing card that has just been shredded by a bullet. (Ok, I just need to take a minute to pick at one detail - the bullet is shown with the casing still attached, which is inaccurate. The casing holds the charge for firing, and only the tip is propelled forward out of the gun. The casing is either ejected to the side or remains inside, depending on the type of firearm. I understand she rendered it this way to let people know what it is, but it was the one detraction for me in the impact of the painting.)

Uh... sorry about that. What struck me the most about it (No, the bullet was secondmost; you are probably wishing it did strike me first by now.) was the pink Chanel suit with the pillbox hat. John F. Kennedy was assassinated two years before I was born, but the 26-second Zapruder film has been shown so much that I knew the dress. That suit is instantly recognised by an entire generation as the one Jackie was wearing when her husband was shot. I imagined her admiring it in a mirror while being fitted for it; feeling a happy little pleasure while trying on the hat. I think she probably ended up despising that dress after having been forced to wear it for several hours stained with her husband's blood; being informed of his death in it, having to witness Johnson being sworn in as the new president in it, and still wearing it while accompaning her husband's body home. That would have put me on the brink of madness.

Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis died May 20, 1994. On Tuesday, while I am selling clothing to women who will be admiring themselves in the mirror and feeling a happy little pleasure from it, in the back of my mind I will be thinking about Jacqueline and hoping that she was able to transcend beyond the stigma of that damned dress.