Grainy paparazzi shots on social media show her hailing a cab in a black slip dress. Walking the streets of New York in an oversize coat. Wearing that signature red lipstick.
Nearly three decades after her death at age 33, Carolyn Bessette Kennedy is back in the spotlight as one of fashion’s most powerful style influencers. The new TV series “Love Story” chronicles her relationship with John F. Kennedy Jr., and many fans are watching for the clothes.
In an era dominated by conspicuous branding and obvious cosmetic enhancements, Bessette Kennedy’s enduring appeal lies in what she did not do.
She had no platform, no brand partnerships, no social media presence.
“She looks so different from the people we see now on Instagram,” said Ashley Traher, a 45-year-old attorney in Phoenix who grew up admiring Bessette Kennedy from afar. “I think we’ll be able to date today’s influencers immediately because of their makeup, clothes, even plastic surgery. But Carolyn had an effortlessness that always looks modern and cool.”
Traher, who first encountered Bessette Kennedy as a teenager flipping through People magazine in rural Lamar, Colorado, dreamed of copying her understated elegance.
“Middle-aged me is still trying to emulate her,” she said.
A quiet influencer
Bessette Kennedy rarely gave interviews, communicating with the outside world mostly through her clothes, says Sunita Kumar Nair, who wrote “CBK: Carolyn Bessette Kennedy: A Life in Fashion,” and consulted on the show.
“I really got a sense that she was extremely private, and it shows because there’s barely any footage of her speaking,” Nair said.
Yet Bessette Kennedy’s influence has proven durable. On TikTok and Instagram, accounts such as @allforcarolyn and @carolynbessettepage are devoted to chronicling her wardrobe. Three of her coats and a little black dress are being auctioned off this month at The Fashion Auctioneer.
Bessette Kennedy, a former Calvin Klein publicist, married Kennedy in 1996. Although her mother-in-law, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, was also famous for her style, “she didn’t copy Jackie. She had her own voice,” Nair said.
“And it wasn’t something that she just deliberately did when she married John. And this is what I loved about Carolyn. She’d actually dressed like this almost throughout her life,” she said. The couple died in a plane crash in 1999.
Signature pieces
You can still buy Bessette Kennedy’s exact Charles J. Wahba tortoise headband from C.O. Bigelow, a Greenwich Village apothecary where she shopped.
“It’s the original one. That’s the one,” said Alec Ginsberg, 34, whose family has owned the store for four generations.
“We still have one of the beauty associates who remembers her. She was super-sweet. My father remembers her as well,” he said.
Ginsberg has seen more customers coming in over the past couple of years — and especially since “Love Story” began airing — because of interest in Bessette Kennedy.
“It’s not just the headband, it’s that people want to shop where she shopped,” he said. “Girls will come in and ask if anyone knew her. They try to find out little bits of information.”
Recreating CBK’s style for TV
“Love Story,” part of Ryan Murphy’s expanding slate of cultural retrospectives, sparked debate after fans who saw early test images of the actors in costume felt the clothing failed to capture Bessette Kennedy’s precise restraint.
Some of the criticism, Nair said, caught the wardrobe team off guard, and led them to pay more attention to every tailoring detail.
“I think that is actually the irony of Carolyn’s clothes, that it does look simple, but it’s actually really not,” she said.
The first few episodes mostly take place during the period before Bessette Kennedy was famous, and her wardrobe is generally approachable — a simple black dress, or jeans and a basic top.
“I’m very interested to see if the character’s clothing choices will change as she becomes more ingrained with the Kennedys,” Traher said. “So far she’s still cool and very ‘90s Calvin Klein with the slip dresses, but maybe less polished than she ended up being.”
There’s an “undercover quality” to Bessette Kennedy’s influence, said Rebecca Resnick Gick, a former editor at Vogue and Teen Vogue and a personal shopper. She describes the look as “educated tailoring.”
“She looked high-end and well-fitted without being flashy,” she said.
That sensibility has quietly shaped contemporary fashion. Brands like The Row have built entire aesthetics around a similar vocabulary.
“It’s always been there,” Resnick Gick said. “That New York restraint. Masculine tailoring as empowerment.”
What’s old is new again
There’s also been a resurgence of interest in ‘90s and Y2K fashion in general, fashion industry observers say . Vintage shopping has surged among Gen Z.
Part of it is the cyclical nature of fashion — younger generations wanting to express their own sensibilities, and perhaps seeing the styles of their childhoods as retro, quaint or nostalgic.
Danielle O’Connell, a 30-year-old stylist in New York, said that after years dominated by casual streetwear, maximalist branding and algorithm-friendly spectacle, some fashionistas are swinging back toward polish. To dress a client attending the “Love Story” premiere, O’Connell and her Los Angeles-based partner, Alix Gropper, naturally turned to Bessette Kennedy as a reference point.
“We wanted that quiet luxury moment,” O’Connell said.
Shades of Princess Di and Ralph Lauren
Natalie Decleve, a New York-based homes and style designer, says Bessette Kennedy’s “clean, classic, old-money” style has an American vibe akin to Ralph Lauren.
“It’s that same language,” Decleve said. “A very clean version of the ’90s.”
Bessette Kennedy is also compared often to Princess Diana, Decleve noted, because both women managed to look approachable while remaining aspirational.
Actor Sarah Pidgeon, who plays Bessette Kennedy in “Love Story,” said she got a glimpse of the real person underneath the stylish facade.
“There is a bit of mystery about her, you know — she never sat down for an interview. There’s no memoir that she wrote,” said Pidgeon.
“But from everything I’ve learned about her, she was an incredibly ambitious, vivacious, warm, funny woman,” said Pidgeon. “And I think that while her style is replicated so often, there is something about the woman who wore the clothes, and how she embodied them, that makes those photos so enduring.”
___
Alicia Rancilio in Detroit contributed to this report.
