Why I Always Consult The Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy Moodboard When I'm In A Style Rut
Let me start by confessing that I don't like trends. Yes, I am a former fashion editor who now works on the website of a fashion magazine, but I bristle at the mere mention of trends. In fact, I consider myself a reformed trend devotee.
While entirely subjective, the maxim I use to dress myself is that I clothe my body in items that bring me closer to who I truly am. I have no desire to dress according to another's rulebook; my style playbook has been written, researched and co-signed by me, for me. That's not to say though that the way that I dress and the lens through which I see style hasn't been influenced, formed like putty in the palm of a hand, by metabolising other's. My style sophist of choice? Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy, whose sartorial blink-and-you'll-miss-it nonchalance has been my north star for as long as I can remember.
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It's not just me. Her tutelary power over the world of fashion at-large is unmissable. Bessette-Kennedy walked – in her heavy rotation of Levi's 517s and TSE Cashmere, no doubt – so that today's coterie of covetable, less-is-more labels could run. Toteme, Khaite, The Row, and Céline are all brands whose core DNA harks to the former Calvin Klein publicist's immortalised image. Her undiluted influence is unsurprising. The 'nostalgia pendulum' dictates that it takes 30 years for a trend cycle to repeat itself, and it was exactly three decades ago, in 1994, that Bessette-Kennedy started officially dating the late president John F. Kennedy and Jackie Kennedy Onassis' son.
On TikTok, a generation of young women – many of whom weren't even born before Bessette-Kennedy died in 1999 – have discovered her style. Many have referred to her style as their 'Roman Empire' – a nod to the viral TikTok trend that has evolved into a catchphrase referring to something one thinks about very often – and 'muse'. Last year, a coffee table book, Carolyn Bessette Kennedy: A Life in Fashion, written and researched by creative director Sunita Kumar Nair, was released with the aim of paying homage to both Bessette-Kennedy's’s style, and the woman herself.
Of course, all of this fanfare would ironically have left Bessette-Kennedy unconcerned. Oft-considered America's answer to Princess Diana – the two died two years apart – Kennedy occupied a considerable amount of prime-time real estate in tabloids, yet her fashion remained unchanged by the increased velocity in stories concerning her. Kennedy was a style stoic, as inclined to avoid trends as she was to set them by virtue of wearing what she most enjoyed. Despite being courted by fashion houses as the partner of political royalty, Kennedy was nonplussed by the trends that swirled around her; New York Magazine reported in the late-1990s that she had asked a Prada shop assistant to remove the brand’s logo from a ski outfit she’d bought from the brand.
In fact, her relationship with designers was symbiotic. One of Bessette-Kennedy’s most defining looks was a black strapless dress from Yohji Yamamoto’s AW98 collection, which she wore with long black opera gloves and black heels to the Municipal Art Society Gala that same year. The admiration was reciprocated, with Yamamoto naming Bessette-Kennedy among his inspirations, telling WWD in 1999: 'She is the walking creation. She is the woman of taste and dignity.'
You can't know or teach that which Bessette-Kennedy inherently imbibed, but you can take lessons from her innate comfort with herself. In an interview about her book, Nair said that the beauty of her is the 'mystery'. In many ways, we can project the image of Bessette-Kennedy that we'd like to see onto her. She can be somebody who both knew and understood style and adored fashion, and somebody who cared very little as to what she wore. 'Some of it [the mystery] still remains mystery to this day,' Nair said. 'Even though I sent boards to Yohji [Yamamoto] and Prada, and we were working through archives, there were still [looks] that they were like, we just can't say. And that was just extraordinary.'
It takes great skill and prowess to be able to eschew societal expectation in today's age of social media and trends that move on at breakneck speed. But whenever I feel like I'm sartorially drifting, it's Bessette-Kennedy whose style I return to time and time again. Despite her star that shone – and continues to shine – so brightly, Bessette-Kennedy cultivated a style that defied the déjà vu of fashion trends themselves. If that's not something to aspire to, I don't know what is.
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