Jacqueline lasted two seasons with Emilio Pucci. “He had such fantastic energy. He was the first man to wear his clothes very, very tight. He called me ‘Giraffina,’ baby giraffe.” And, to her everlasting gratitude, Pucci prophesied that if she chose, she “could walk in Christian Dior’s shoes.”xasperated, and possibly amused, Jacqueline’s father-in-law described his renegade relation as a “cross between a Russian Princess and a girl of the Folies Bergere.
After the Marquis de Cuevas died, his wife withdrew her support for his ballet company. Jacqueline stepped into the breach as the new manager, with sidekick de Larrain as impresario. Their joint brainchild was an exquisitely ambitious remounting of Prokofiev’swith Geraldine Chaplin, then a 17-year-old ballet student, deposited by de Larrain in a small part to generate publicity. “I already knew her father, Charlie,” Jacqueline says. “I taught him to do the Twist.
The collection was an immediate critical and commercial hit. The signature suit, a tweed number shaped on the sides with velvet, was “copied like crazy,” Jacqueline says. “I made the suit that way because I had run out of tweed! For that first collection, I used bits and pieces.” She also used her own real jewelry, and on one particular dress her own 10-year-old Kenneth Jay Lane belt, which, because of the outfit’s popularity, Lane says, he suddenly had to “remake over and over.