Goodbye Jackie, Hello Amanda!

There's nothing exclusive about the electorate; it is made up of society editors, socialites, columnists and dress designers across the U.S. and Canada --in fact, just about anybody who writes in for a ballot. But their votes establish the pecking order among the world's best-dressed women. And last week, as the New York Couture Group promoted Jacqueline Kennedy to transient immortality as a member of the Fashion Hall of Fame, the voters filled Jackie's No. 1 spot with an all but unknown Manhattan socialite, 22-year-old Amanda Mortimer Burden.

Peers' Delight. Well, actually, not all that unknown. Vogue last month devoted four pages to Photographer Irving Penn's black-and-white studies of fineboned, long-tressed Amanda from the shoulders up, and last year gave eight pages in color, titled "The Young Joyous Life," to Amanda and her 23-year-old Harvard and Columbia Law School student husband, S. Carter Burden Jr. For in the judgment of her peers, Amanda is a delight. A stepdaughter of CBS President William Paley, her mother is Babs Paley, one of Boston's famous Gushing sisters, herself on the best-dressed list for years and a member of the Hall of Fame.

But none of this prepared Amanda for the shock. She was just out of bed and barely into her morning paper in her Manhattan apartment at the Dakota (same floor as Jason Robards and Lauren Bacall) when she spotted her name in boldface. Down dropped her paper and her aplomb.

"Why," she gasped, "did they put me on top of their list? I don't go to Paris to buy my dresses. I buy them off the rack at Bendel's." Had she learned any secrets from her mother? "None at all. We are completely different," said Amanda, who thinks white is her best nighttime color, likes fake jewelry and textured stockings.

Labeled Kookie. "If you'd asked my mother who Balenciaga was," said the other surprise winner, Broadway's Barbra Streisand, who showed up in eighth place,* "she would have thought it was a grocery store in Brooklyn." Nor had Barbra (TIME cover, April 10, 1964) got there by the Bendel route; she designs her own clothes--a golden sable coat with a middy collar, a green brocade suit of the same material as her bedroom walls and, for accessories, old beaded bags with real jewel clasps and new shoes with old buckles. The Couture Group liked it, cited her "extraordinary individuality and infallible fashion instinct." Sighed Barbra. "Now life will be so much less frustrating. I've been labeled with the kookie image for so long."

* Others in the top ten: 2) Mrs. Alfred Gwynne Vanderbilt, 3) Mrs. Wyatt Cooper (Gloria Vanderbilt), 4) Mrs. Giancarlo Uzielli (Anne Ford) and Mrs. Stavros Niarchos (Charlotte Ford), paired "because their tastes are identical," 5) Mrs. Joseph P. Kennedy, 6) Mrs. Kirk Douglas, 7) Mrs. Angus Ogilvy (Princess Alexandra of Kent), 9) Mrs. Charles Engelhard, 10) Mrs. William McCormick Blair (wife of the U.S. Ambassador to the Philippines).

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.