The 1968 White House Fashion Show

On February 29, 1968, Lady Bird Johnson hosted the first–and last–White House Fashion Show. The fashion show, intended both to highlight the fourth largest industry in the United States and to promote domestic tourism, inadvertently became one of the many PR missteps of the Johnson administration, as it occurred in the midst of the Tet Offensive. Just one month later LBJ announced on national television that he would not seek reelection, and today the fashion show is largely forgotten. 

Joining me to help us understand how and why Lady Bird Johnson ended up hosting a White House Fashion Show, and why it was never repeated, is fashion history Dr. Kimberly Chrisman-Campbell, author of Red, White, and Blue on the Runway: The 1968 White House Fashion Show and the Politics of American Style.

Our theme song is Frogs Legs Rag, composed by James Scott and performed by Kevin MacLeod, licensed under Creative Commons. The mid-episode is “The Stars and Stripes Forever March,” composed by John Philip Sousa and performed by the United States Marine Corps Band; the audio is in the public domain. The episode image is from the 1968 “Discover America” White House Fashion Show, available via the National Archives (NAID: 218517833, Local ID: 306-SSA-68-8218-CC5), and is in the public domain.

 

Additional Sources:

• “Claudia Alta Taylor ‘Lady Bird’ Johnson,” The White House.
• “The Environmental First Lady,” Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center, The University of Texas at Autin.
• “Spotlight: 1968 White House Fashion Show,” by Kaitlyn Crain Enriquez, National Archives - The Unwritten Record, August 10, 2021.
• “The White House Fashion Show [video],” White House Historical Association, posted on YouTube on June 14, 2022.
• “The 1968 Fashion Show, the History Lesson Melania Missed,” by Kimberly Chrisman-Campbell, Politico, March 5, 2018.
• “Why the First White House Fashion Show Was Also the Last,” by Kimberly Chrisman-Campbell, Slate, October 10, 2014.
• “Discover America Scarf,” Frankie Welch’s Americana: Fashion, Scarves, and Politics, UGA Special Collections Library Online Exhibitions.
• “TET: Who Won?” by Don Oberdorfer, Smithsonian Magazine, November 2004.

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