One day, out of nowhere, a blond white woman flooded my feed.
“Who is this?” I thought. People are talking about her style, her aura, her beauty. The way she styled herself, the way she moved. I click through posts, expecting to understand – and I don’t. I scroll through the outfits, and, well….they’re outfits. Clean lines, muted tones, nothing offensive or loud, and still, I do not get it.
So I looked her up. There’s a show out ‘Love Story: John F. Kennedy Jr. and Carolyn Bessette,’ an FX series about her and her husband, John F. Kennedy Jr. Suddenly, it makes sense why she’s everywhere. The quiet resurgence of 90’s minimalism, it all seems to orbit around her. This woman, I realize, is the latest icon everyone is obsessed with.
She is Carolyn Bessette Kennedy.
To be clear, she was that girl. Before all the blog posts and TikTok moodboards, she was a fashion publicist at Calvin Klein. She worked within the industry, helping shape the image of fashion and understanding the brand’s presentation. That is highly respectable. But even with all that context, I’m still not convinced.
And I don’t want to label Bessette Kennedy as boring, but for a woman who has spent so little time in the spotlight, it is interesting to see her championed as a timeless icon. The scale of her legacy doesn’t even quite match the length of her visibility. And yet, she is everywhere.
Which makes me wonder: why does minimalism always find its way back into popular media? And more importantly, who gets to be the face of it?
Who gets to be timeless?
The “timeless” label is not a neutral one, but one that is assigned, repeated, and agreed upon.
Maybe that’s where the disconnect sits for me. When I look at her, I’m not looking at a woman whose style evolved over decades or someone whose presence continuously reshaped fashion in real time, I’m looking at a specific image, from a specific moment, that has looped to feel permanent.
It’s not that she lacks influence; it’s that her influence feels compressed, contained, and almost too neat. There’s something about the way her image circulates now that feels less like memory and more like curation, one we collectively agreed to treat as iconic, rather than something that actually arrived there over time.
The Minimalism Myth
Minimalism, especially in the 90’s, has always been framed as effortless, timeless, and clean. But minimalism is not neutral. It suggests a kind of control over space, over body, over presentation. It reads as a specific kind of ease. The kind that keeps finding its way back into popular media.
You see it in the “quiet luxury” and clean girl aesthetics, in the return to muted tones and barely-there styling. Even outside of fashion, there’s a cultural shift toward conservatism, toward things that feel contained and controlled.
Minimalism fits perfectly into that.
But when we call it timeless, we’re really stripping it of context, ignoring the fact that it has always been tied to a certain kind of body, a certain lifestyle, and a certain proximity to wealth.
Not everyone is remembered the same. Some people are culturally embedded, existing in your world without needing to be reintroduced. And some are presented to you later, fully formed, already labeled as iconic. As if you somehow missed something.
It reminds me of how fame works differently across communities. There are artists, actors, and figures who are undeniable legends in one space, and almost invisible in another. Not because they lack impact, but because cultural memory isn’t universal.
So when someone is positioned as timeless, it is worth asking; timeless to whom? Because for me, and for a lot of people around me, Carolyn Bessette Kennedy isn’t a figure we grew up with. She’s someone we’re being introduced to now, already framed as essential.
Cultural Context
If you’ve ever been on Howard’s campus during Springfest, Homecoming, or even just a warm afternoon where everyone decides to step out, you would understand immediately. There is no desire to be understated. There is only expression.
And that framing does a lot of work. At an HBCU, style doesn’t look like restraint.
Hair gets bigger, not smaller. Outfits are layered, not stripped down. Accessories do not whisper, they announce themselves. People build a look piece by piece, until there is no question that they are meant to be seen. Nothing about it is accidental.
That expression isn’t random; it’s cultural. It is rooted in a history of having to make yourself visible in spaces that would otherwise overlook you. So instead of reducing, students here expand. They do not strip away their identity; they build on top of it.
So when minimalism comes back around, framed as ideal and refined, I look around, and it doesn’t quite register.
If your fashion language is rooted in abundance, layering, and visibility, then restraint doesn’t feel like elevation but rather absence. And why remove something that was never meant to be removed in the first place?
The Underlying truth
The question isn’t why Carolyn Bessete Kennedy is everywhere right now, but why this kind of image is the one that’s been revived, reframed, and remembered as timeless?
Timelessness isn’t just about longevity. It’s about reputation. It’s who gets archived, who gets circulated, and who gets introduced to new generations, already labeled as essential– and whose stories are left to exist without that language. Once that label is given, it sticks. Not because it’s universal, but because it’s repeated.
So, who gets to be timeless? The people who are closest to power and the aesthetics that read as controlled and familiar to the institutions deciding what lasts.
Timelessness doesn’t just emerge on its own, it’s reinforced through constant reintroduction. Once something is framed that way, it begins to feel natural. Obvious, even.
Everyone else doesn’t disappear. The expression and creativity is still there. Entire cultures of style continue to evolve and influence what we see every day.
But they aren’t always preserved in the same way. They aren’t given the language of timelessness. They’re called trendy, excessive, of the moment. Something to move through, not something to return through.
So when we ask who gets to be timeless, the answer isn’t about taste, but who gets to be framed as worth revisiting.
That’s why some of us don’t see timelessness; we see it being assigned in real time.