What We Want From an On-Screen Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy

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Over the last 48 hours, people have been rage-scrolling through the film stills and paparazzi shots of American Love Story, Ryan Murphy’s upcoming show about the 1990s-era relationship and tragic deaths of John F. Kennedy Jr. and Carolyn Bessette-Kenney. The images show actress Sarah Pidgeon dressed like a Spirit Halloween version of Bessette-Kennedy. For those of us who were hoping to see her impeccable style portrayed on screen, they landed with a thud.

In real life, Bessette-Kennedy was a fashion publicist who worked for Calvin Klein and wore Yohji Yamamoto and Prada. In Ryan Murphy’s version, she wears a slightly wrinkled tan coat in a sad fabric, an ill-fitting copper slip skirt, a pair of Converse high tops tied around the ankle. It’s a watered-down version of quiet luxury, which is a watered-down version of the effortless minimalism Bessette-Kennedy made famous—a version that has, in the years since her untimely death, been objectified and stripped of its inherently good taste.

People are appalled. “A disgrace,” read one comment on Instagram stories. Elsewhere another comment stated, “Pure crime against fashion.” The group chats and Slack channels were popping off in all directions. And the ire isn’t misplaced—for a big-budget T.V. show by a producer/director with a track record of putting beautiful (if outsized and campy) costumes on screen to completely miss the mark on recreating Bessette-Kennedy’s distinct look feels, well, insane.

Are we all just being too harsh? Perhaps these images don’t represent the real wardrobe. Some of them were only test shots, and, as one colleague pointed out, the sneakers may have been for comfort: perhaps Pidgeon was filming a running scene that required multiple takes. (Personally, I think she would have been perfectly comfortable scampering to and fro in a pair of sensible flats from The Row or Alaia.) Or perhaps Murphy is just trolling us. It’s curious that a costume designer is not listed among the credits pertaining to the show anywhere online. Is this whole thing some kind of a weird decoy?

Or, maybe Murphy’s making a bigger point about Bessette-Kennedy’s relationship with fame. In fact, she made a conscious effort to dress down and appear—though she was far from it—basic in an effort to avoid the intense media attention throughout her relationship with JFK Jr. In her 2024 biography Once Upon a Time: The Captivating Life of Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy, Elizabeth Beller cited one of the publicist’s close friends explaining: “She became obsessed with not giving the press anything to find wrong—a hair out of place, the wrong color or fit of clothes, or having a scrap of dirt under her fingernails. There was a muting of herself—in her hair, body style of dress—to make herself less remarkable, less accessible, less newsworthy, both to the press and to the public, who were hounding her in increasingly intimidating ways.” Ironically, here we are again, scrutinizing her (even if it’s in the form of a character).

It’s also important to remember that, sadly, Bessette-Kennedy was only 31 years old when she died. Though she was horribly hounded and often misjudged by the media, only 100 or so public images of her were ever taken and published. When people dissect her looks on social media, trying to distill them down into a uniform or a signature style, they’re really only working with a handful of images. As Neverworn’s Liana Satenstein wrote in her newsletter, “The woman gatekept herself. You can’t put that kind of fantasy in a moodboard, but at this point, I’m surprised there isn’t an affiliate link for the brand of toilet paper CBK used.” Culturally, we’re enamored with a fairytale life cut brutally short and someone’s clothes can be a way to memorialize them, even if we don’t fully understand the choices behind her day-to-day looks.

Bessette-Kennedy’s tightly-edited wardrobe itself feels like a rarity, at least in today’s fashion world where traditional glamour is hard to come by, where there are thousands of brands, trends coming and going by the second, and paid Substack accounts telling us how to achieve personal style. For her, it was about curation and quality, not mass and flash and following the leader. It was a spirit of style, not a signature style as we know the phrase today.

As Jack Senhert, who runs the Instagram account @carolynbessette said, this is where the American Love Story costumes are failing. “You cannot simply exchange one camel coat with another here, because we only ever saw her in one,” he noted. “You also can’t fake your way to looking effortless,” he added. “No amount of tutorials or styling tips will add authenticity to your look. The best way to emulate Carolyn is to dress to accentuate your own features in classic pieces you’ll own forever, not simply to wear beige and black, which is sadly what she is commonly watered down to.”

Bessette-Kennedy was a quiet force in pop culture, but she was a force nonetheless, and one with a major impact on fashion, whether she intended it or not. Any TV show about her needs a wardrobe that gives context to her essence. Her style was great, but her taste gave off the magic. That distinction gets lost in a lot of today’s discourse around personal style. Style isn’t just a hashtag or a Reddit topic or a meme, it’s a living, breathing thing, even when portrayed on screen. It’s a creative expression, and there’s nothing vapid or basic about it. In the case of American Love Story, whether the joke will eventually be on us or not, Bessette-Kennedy’s sartorial legacy deserves more love—and less polyester.

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