Frankie Welch & Betty Ford
Frankie Welch’s renown increased significantly when her friend Betty Ford became First Lady in August 1974. Betty and Gerald Ford had moved from Grand Rapids, Michigan to Washington, D.C. in 1949 when he was elected to serve in the House of Representatives. They relocated to nearby Alexandria in 1951. Ford and Welch, both young mothers, attended the same church and became neighborhood friends. Ford had worked as a model, dancer, and fashion coordinator before marrying, and the two women bonded through clothing. Ford was an early customer at Welch’s shop, and continued to purchase clothes there throughout her husband’s political rise.
In early 1975, Welch designed a scarf for Betty Ford to use as White House gifts. She made this scarf especially personal, using one of Ford’s favorite flowers, petunias; hues that matched her favorite turtleneck shirts—pink, orange, purple, and green; polka-dots, which she liked; and her signature.
Betty Ford was known for wearing simple, comfortable, practical clothes with traditional accessories. She favored scarves, and Welch told one reporter, “Mrs. Ford has 60 of my scarves and she knows how to tie them and wear them.” Nancy Howe, Ford’s personal assistant, said, “The thing that works best in Mrs. Ford’s wardrobe is definitely scarves.” Even a decade later, a writer for the Washington Post Magazine listed scarves as the fashion item with which Ford would always be associated in the memories of Americans.
In June 1976 Betty Ford donated a dress designed by Frankie Welch to represent her in the Smithsonian Institution’s First Ladies Collection. Welch used a light-green nylon chiffon embroidered with chrysanthemums and sequins of the same color over a fabric that is probably silk, making it the first dress with a synthetic material to enter the collection. Ford described the dress as her “favorite,” and considered it “timeless and not gimmicky.”
