Boutique owner Frankie Welch, who helped First Ladies, diplomats’ wives and other hobnobbers in the Beltway dress stylishly for more than 40 years, has died at the age of 97.
A private family service was held earlier this month. An exhibition of Welch’s designs and life is planned for January at the University of Georgia’s Athens campus, where she had done some graduate classes and subsequently donated much of her archives. The school’s Hargrett Library will unveil “Frankie Welch’s Americana: Fashion, Scarves and Politics” on January 21. Welch died Sept. 2 at the Westminster-Canterbury of the Blue Ridge, where she resided.
When Richard Nixon resigned and Gerald Ford succeeded him, Welch and her husband were among the small group at the White House that watched Ford be sworn in. When the Smithsonian National Museum of American History asked Betty Ford to select a dress that she had worn at a White House state dinner, in lieu of an inaugural one for its First Ladies Hall, she chose one that Welch had designed for the 1975 state dinner in honor of the Shah of Iran.
After the family relocated to Alexandria in 1953, Welch taught “clothes coordination” at the University of Maryland, became a guest lecturer and started a fashion consulting business. Many wives of congressmen or administration members who had moved to Washington, D.C., started phoning Welch for advice about how to dress appropriately. Welch decided rather than take them all over Washington, searching for clothes, she would open her own store in Alexandria.
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