Athina Onassis’s Return to Couture Evokes Jackie’s Elegance

Seeing her in public is an event, and the rarity of the appearance was coupled with some familial and sartorial intrigue. In the front row at Stéphane Rolland’s couture show in Paris, Athina Onassis, the sole heir to Aristotle Onassis’s immense estate (along with the foundation dedicated to her uncle, Alexander), wore a knee-length black dress, cape sleeves, heeled shoes, and some jewelry: classic choices that, accompanied by a 1960s hairstyle, recalled the style of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, who married her grandfather after the death of John F. Kennedy.

Jackie and Athina are said to have never met. A great style icon of the twentieth century, Jackie married her second husband in 1968. When Aristotle died in 1975, he left his daughter Christina as his only heir, after his son Alexander died in a 1973 plane crash. When Christina died in 1988, Athina, her then-three-year-old girl, grew up with her father’s family, far from the flashes and from Greece, the country of the Onassis family.

She has sought to preserve that distance. A lover of horses, it has always been easier to see Onassis at a competition or in the saddle. To see her in the front row again, one must go back to a 2015 Giorgio Armani show.

At that time she had her ex-husband Álvaro de Miranda Neto next to her, and her style was more simple and essential. Today she hews closer to her origins in her emphasis on glamour—as the heir to a fortune thought to exceeds 2 billion euros, she is a fitting haute couture client.

For style and dynastic observers, the hope is that Rolland’s show will spark Onassis’s full-fledged return to the fashion spotlight.

Originally published in Vanity Fair Italia.