Fashion of the 1st Laddy

I do recall that early in her husband's tenure as president, Mrs. Reagan wore black knickers with a dress, which generated lot of controversy, but I haven't done further research on it - though I seem to remember a story about it at the time in the Washington Post.

With regard to First Ladies' most outrageous outfits, there are several instances of First Ladies' wardrobes causing controversy. One prime example is a story about Ida McKinley scandalizing in Turkish pants outfits, but this is not based in fact. I have done perhaps more extensive research on her whole life in preparation for what will eventually be published as the first full-length biography of her life and nowhere is there any claim of accuracy - and obviously no documentation - on her wearing these pants. Perhaps it was done as a satire - I know that H. L. Mencken famously cracked that Millard Fillmore's only accomplishment was installing the first White House bathtub, and for almost 80 years now, it still circulates as "fact"! Below are several other outlandish stories involving fashions of the First Ladies.

Jackie Kennedy wore a leopard coat that is credited, unfortunately, with setting off a trend that seriously depleted the worldwide leopard population.

One of the women's magazines, I think it was Ladies Home Journal, often had a big cover story and profile of an incumbent First Lady after she'd been there for a few years and often accompanied by a spread of them in new styles, etc. This is where Pat Nixon first appeared wearing pants - the first First Lady to do so. I seem to recall that it was an issue in the re-election year of her husband, which would be 1972.

There is also a great story of how Frances Cleveland unwittingly expedited the demise of the bustle dress in either the late 1880's or mid-1890's (she was First Lady from June 1886 to March 1889 - she married the incumbent President in the White House and he was defeated for re-election - and then returned from March 1893 to March 1897 when he came back to defeat Harrison in their second face-off election and served a second full, though non-consecutive term.) In any event, as the young bride of a President and then as a young mother of three young daughters (one of whom was the only child of a President actually born in the White House) she was enormously popular and her clothing style was copied by many other women. Two reporters in Washington during the summer apparently were hard-pressed for a breaking-news story and completely made up the claim that Mrs. Cleveland didn't like the bustle and would no longer wear it when the forthcoming social season began that fall. The story moved fast - and women by the thousands apparently abandoned the bustle too.

Along those lines, Frances Cleveland wore many gowns that showed off her bare neck, shoulders and arms - (sleeveless I think is the right term). It alarmed the Women's Christian Temperance Union and they actually drew up and had their various branches copy a petition, then sought to get all its members to sign it, asking the First Lady to stop wearing these dresses because it corrupted the morals of young women who copied her. She kept wearing them.

Mary Lincoln liked to wear ball gowns with very long trains but also without shoulders and President Lincoln once remarked that he thought she needed "a little less tail and little more neck" instead. She was also known for wearing elaborate head-dresses of multiple roses, and in a letter to his wife, one Senator described Mrs. Lincoln critically, as wearing a "flower-pot" on her head.

Eleanor Roosevelt was famous for sometimes running from one task to another, from private life to a public event at the White House, and on occasion shocked people by showing up wearing her hair net or a white head scarf tied in her hair which looked like a rag of sorts.

I cannot recall the specific person who either stated or wrote about Julia Grant who wore the heavily beaded, embroidered, laced, tasseled and ribboned gowns of the Victorian era, but she was sarcastically described as looking like a piece of a furniture set.

In contrast, her successor, the highly moralistic Lucy Hayes wore clothes that covered her entirely to her wrists and neck, and wore her hair simply parted in the center with nothing but a Spanish comb and reporter Mary Clemmer Ames mused whether the "world of Vanity Fair" would "paint and powder" her image in magazines - and compared her beatific expression and simple style to the Mother of Christ.