Power and the Cold War Pillbox Hat

While the term costume has come to mean the use of clothing to change identity, particularly in a theatrical setting, it derived from the French to indicate customary dress; it described the appearance of constructed cloth to indicate gender, class, nationality, and social activities in the everyday. Women and men, particularly those in the public eye, learned to carefully mold their image through clothing that served as costume.

During the global Cold War, women emerged as an ideological flashpoint as communism met capitalism. While idealized Soviet women worked, Western women served the nuclear family. Whatever the realities of these ideals, while men in politics on either side were relatively limited to suit and tie, women took to the stage. When models wearing Dior hit Moscow at the famous 1959 exhibition, only the legacy of the “Kitchen Debate” overshowed the impact of fashion to promote the West.

This paper explores the iconic 1961 photograph of First Lady Jackie Kennedy standing next to Nina Khrushcheva, the wife of the Premiere of the Soviet Union to explore the use of fashion as a statement to promote power and tenets of national identity. While the American was a flawless model and the Soviet referenced the worker, this stark difference did not set the stage for US female diplomats on the global stage. The analysis turns to the case of Eleanor Lansing Dulles, head of the Berlin Desk during the fraught Cold War years, 1952-1959, known as “The Mother of Berlin,” and who wore her plain grey coat with a Kennedy pillbox hat and pearls. As a woman not relegated to a man’s suit, she represented those who took this area of women’s lives that offered greater freedom than that offered to men to assert nuanced ideas about the West during the Cold War.