"Beautiful, cultured, refined. A true queen, capable of winning the respect of the powerful and reaching the hearts of the people." This is how Chiara Pasqualetti Johnson describes, in the incipit of her new biography of female characters for White Star Editore, to be released in November, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, the unforgettable American first lady, who five years after the death of her husband, American President John F. Kennedy, assassinated in Dallas in 1963, married the Greek shipowner Aristotle Onassis.
"Jackie. The Life and Style of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis" is a biography that comes 30 years after her death. A portrait that intertwines words and beautiful images to bring out the unique nature of a woman who has been able to impose herself for her strong personality and refined elegance. The book paints a portrait of an American girl of unconventional beauty, curious, educated according to the principles of the time ("A Great Woman alongside a Great Man"), qualities of resourcefulness, will and determination. A woman endowed with a natural and refined elegance, built with small details that immediately become her distinctive features. The book traces his life chronologically, from his youthful education under the guidance of his ambitious mother to his meeting with a young politician on the rise, John Fitzgerald Kennedy-JFK (under the guidance of an ambitious father-in-law), to the tragic events of the Dallas murder, to his second life alongside Onassis, up to his last years and his love for the diamond merchant Maurice Templesman. Born and raised in a patriarchal era, following a prophetic phrase uttered as a young girl ("I will never be a simple housewife"), Jackie, who before marrying JFK was already a photojournalist for the Washington Times-Herald, has remained faithful to her promise and has become a co-star of the strong and powerful men she has joined for love (intense, always). "And yet, none of them," comments the author, "has ever overshadowed her. Above all, she has gone down in history, with her personality and her unmistakable style." Clear and progressive ideas, anticipating the feminine and social achievements of the following decades, Jackie was strong-willed. "She certainly didn't have the sensational beauty of her rival Marilyn Monroe, yet the unforgettable Jackie style ignited, indeed inflamed, fashion trends. Every element of her wardrobe is a timeless classic."
The book offers something more than a biography: it is "A continuous cross-reference between words and images," says the author, "which allows you to satisfy the curiosity to see what the dress described on the opposite page looked like, or what the people mentioned in that chapter looked like." The author has drawn on her journalistic training to give shape to a book that never lapses into gossip, but which has its foundation in historical and iconographic research. It took two years to write the volume: in this time the author analyzed almost everything about Jackie that had been published.
A Milanese journalist with a degree in art history, the author writes about travel, art and lifestyle for major Italian magazines. In 2018, with the White Star publishing house, she published "Portraits of great women of our time", an illustrated volume dedicated to the most influential female figures of the twentieth century, translated into 14 languages. With the same publisher in 2020 came out "Coco Chanel. The Style Revolution" bestseller translated into 8 international editions, as well as "Chanel N°5. The perfume of the century". In 2022, "Audrey, a life and a style" and "Together. Female portraits, energy in motion", a mosaic of 50 contemporary muses.
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