The Pink Suit - Nicole Mary Kelby

Judge the book by the cover

The Pink Suit is about much more than the creation of the iconic costume Jackie Kennedy was wearing on the day in 1963 when her husband John F. Kennedy was shot in Dallas, Texas. It's also so much more than an insight into the fashion industry during its golden age, but undoubtedly this is also a significant and fascinating aspect of Nicole Mary Kelby's novel, particularly in the loving attention to detail that goes into her descriptions of the cut and craft of the Chanel design, as well as the controversy over the copies and the competition.

The creation of the famous pink suit however is actually delicately undertaken by a Manhattan fashion house, Chez Ninon, where Kate is a seamstress. It's a higher class knock-off copy designer house, a kind of a front to ensure that the First Lady is seen to be supporting the US fashion industry and not spending a fortune on importing a fancy French wardrobe. It's Kate, tasked with replicating the Chanel suit, who is the focus of the novel. Coming from an Irish immigrant family, her experience and background extends our view of the period, taking in life on the streets in New York for ordinary people during extraordinary times.

Kate's personal circumstances places her in  a perfect positioned to capture this sublime moment in history; in near-touching distance with celebrity, hoping to start her own fashion house, but feeling the down-to-earth tug of family responsibility and the pressure to marry a fiancé who is a butcher by profession. That is a fascinating and infinitely more interesting area to explore than adding to the crowded field of literature on the sordid history of JFK's term of office and the conspiracies surrounding his assassination. From this perspective, the evocation of the period is just wonderful, the writing capturing the buzz of the Catholic Irish-American community of New York, the glamour of the fashion industry, and the feeling of being at the centre of the world.

Nicole Mary Kelby's writing is almost miraculous in how she is able to create a sense of something greater out of something so seemingly prosaic, mirroring Kate's experience with Jackie Kennedy's. I don't for a second believe that an Irish butcher boy and a back-room seamstress are capable of expressing their feelings for each other and for the intricacies of their humble professions in language that has such poetic resonance for life and living, but it's easy to feel that this is the poetry of their souls and the magic of the age. It's simply gorgeous heartfelt writing of remarkable insight and a beauty of expression that gives us a sense of what it must have been like to live in a time when everything was greater, when anything seemed possible, when the dream of perfection could be summed up in an exquisitely tailored suit. For an all-too-brief while at least.

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