It starts with a Frank Ocean song that most people are tired of hearing at this point. M-R-S dot Kennedy, she signed her name in pen, in the fancy fancy cursive, then turned her term papers in. It plays over a series of grainy paparazzi images—Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy walking in New York, blonde hair pulled back, a long coat, eyes looking anywhere but at the camera. The comments are littered with “she’s so Princess Diana,” “I can’t believe she’s gone,” “the ultimate cool girl,” “Daryl Hannah was his soulmate.” I roll my eyes and delete the app again.
The issue here is that the Frank Ocean Mrs. Kennedy is a fictional one. She’s a summer romance, and a TikTok-constructed archetype to add onto a growing pile of what we’ve begun to decide true displays of “luxury” really are. The real Carolyn will never be visible through images alone, and I can’t tell you who she was either. What I do know is that even though searches for “Calvin Klein 90s” skyrocketed by 850% in the US the week of the show’s release, Calvin Klein is not the standalone star of Carolyn’s style story.
The CBK trend that’s been flooding the internet since the launch of FX’s Love Story paints the picture of a woman who stood for minimalism, clean lines, that one C.O. Bigelow headband; the overall image of quiet luxury before it was a trend. Her actual wardrobe was more complicated, though. She wore Yohji Yamamoto and Comme des Garçons, designers who communicated through structural oddities and very deliberate anti-glamour things, sure to be incredibly perplexing to the extremely glamorous family she married into. The internet is attributing the curation of an aesthetic to Carolyn, but if anything, she was refusing one and just wearing what she wanted.
A woman actually living out that philosophy right now is someone who most of the internet would probably find antithetical to CBK’s whole vibe. I think of Tracee Ellis Ross. She has stated plainly multiple times that she dresses for herself first, she likes to have fun with what she’s wearing, and that her wardrobe is a relationship rather than a statement. That quality she has about her, a vision that is so clear and settled that she doesn’t need to announce what it is online, is exactly what this whole CBK trend wants to achieve and yet ends up editing out in its practice.
Carolyn never gave interviews or explained herself. She was so famously guarded that many people never heard the sound of her voice. She spent the end of her life fighting to keep a boundary up between the public and her personal life, as impossible as that was. The photos we see set to “American Wedding” are framed to give off a minimalist, mysterious vibe, but in reality, they just show a woman who was trying to get away from the camera.
It’s possible that the most honest thing we can do in the wake of Love Story and the conversation that has been surrounding it is to admit that we don’t really want CBK’s wardrobe, although that’s the story that’s been peddled. We want to be perceived with the same air of mystery as she seems to have had around her. The right camel midi skirt isn’t going to do that. CBK was a real person, Carolyn, and she tragically died in a way that solidified her name in the public’s mouths in a way she likely never wanted. The public watched her lose her agency and her spark—two things that made her stand out in the first place. She isn’t here to speak for herself or tell us about those days if she really wanted to. She knew exactly who she was and what she wanted.
It’s okay to lean into the nostalgia for a time many of us never even knew, a 90s New York with no phones in sight and a feeling in the air we could only hope to experience, and fashion has always been a bit of magical thinking. But we need to at least be honest about whose fantasy this actually is and who we’re fantasising about. And it isn’t really Carolyn.