In 1998, Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy attended an art gala in Midtown wearing a strapless black column dress, velvet evening gloves, understated pumps and barely any jewelry, the silhouette of her collarbones defined in the frenzy of photographic flashes. John F. Kennedy Jr., her famous husband and the editor of the pop-politics magazine George, made a fitting plus-one, clad in a simple bow tie tuxedo, holding her hand even as she occasionally glanced perturbed at the flash of the cameras.
Today, almost 25 years after her death, Carolyn’s pared-back, well-tailored clothing, ice blonde hair often paired with a statement-red lip, and iconic outfits appear in the pages of CBK: Carolyn Bessette Kennedy, A Life in Fashion, a coffee table book written by Sunita Kumar Nair, a fashion creative director. Instagram accounts dedicated to Carolyn’s memory count thousands of followers with daily hits and engagement, immortalizing the ‘90s tastemaker and longtime Calvin Klein publicist as a forever icon of style. Her cultivated style qualities fit easily into the pervasive nostalgia for that decade and internet-borne trends like ‘quiet luxury’ and ‘stealth wealth,’ which express a return to the minimalist lifestyle principle of ‘less is more’.
“There’s a mystery about Carolyn which is really important; she was very private. That’s what the attraction is with people because nobody knows who she is still,” Kumar Nair tells Coveteur. “Artistically, creatively, and stylistically, you can imprint parts of what you think she is to her. That’s why she still reigns in this day and age.”
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Made anxious by the constant stalking of the paparazzi after marrying JFK Jr., Carolyn used beauty and fashion as a way to exercise control over her life, the straight lines of her clothing and her slicked-back hair striving to minimize imperfections in the public eye. As such, fashion became an armor deflecting the worst criticism of the tabloids, that treated her irreverence for fame as an excuse to smear her in misogynistic ways, not unlike the invasive attention Princess Diana confronted at the time. As trends like ‘quiet luxury’ and the question of sustainable dressing dominate the fashion world, Carolyn’s popularity more than twenty years after her death reflects not just the iconicity of her style, but a widespread turn to minimalist dressing in the wake of pandemic-induced normcore, as most people swapped blazers for sweatpants while working from home. The desire to elevate casual dressing comes amidst the need to shop on a budget and invest in long-lasting pieces of clothing as the recession hits our bank accounts.
As a student who enjoyed wearing grungy clothing reflecting her interest in Nirvana and Sonic Youth, Sunita Kumar Nair first discovered Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy on the cover of a gossip magazine at a petrol station in Manchester in 1996. After Kumar Nair joined the fashion industry as an editor, minimalism became a way to buy “prize pieces” without overstretching her budget, prioritizing quality and fit and curating staples that made a visual impact.
“It’s being really considered, it’s taking note of your body shape and body frame and what actually suits you, what colors suit you, and staying away from too many trends,” Kumar Nair continues. “It’s having essential pieces that you could always go to,” noting a black polo-neck jumper and a classic white shirt as examples. Carolyn remained a source of inspiration for Kumar Nair over the years. “As a stylist, you have to have a catalog of women in your mind when you’re either doing a fashion shoot or an advertising job,” she says. “And Carolyn was always my go-to when I thought about New York style. Her ensembles reflected the way I liked to dress, so in a way I was quite drawn to her.”
And to this day, Carolyn’s looks dictate the collective fashion imagination, whether it’s a camel midi skirt, an abundance of clean, structured white shirts, the lingerie-like sensuality of the slip dress, a good pair of jeans, or the rare pop of colors and print, such as a leopard print coat she bought at a flea market in Paris. Even her double-dyed blonde hair, gelled back or loose, barely-there makeup, and meticulously plucked eyebrows eerily parallel the clean girl aesthetic today, which gained traction on TikTok earlier this year and has been an internet fixture since 2021. The movement connotes a minimalist approach to makeup, jewelry, and hairstyling that centers the glow-y look championed by the skin care industry, and a meaningful departure from the flashy Insta baddie aesthetic that preceded it. While the clean girl aesthetic has faced criticism for promoting a culture of purity that doesn’t make room for women with blemishes, unruly hair, or imperfections, the trend also heavily borrows from the beauty regimens of Black and Latinx women, such as wearing plain gold hoops, gelling or combing out the hair, and subtly shaping the eyebrows—what fashion critic Rian Phin calls “an amalgamation of uptown white girl culture and ‘90s Black and Latin aesthetics.”
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The underlying nostalgia for the ‘90s, of days gone by romanticized in the backwards-gazing lens of Gen Z, seems to shape almost every fashion trend on the internet, spurring critics to question whether these are even ‘trends’ to begin with, and not just a buzzy reframing of wardrobe essentials that have existed for decades. “The quiet luxury ‘trend’ isn’t really a trend at all. The pieces that make up the effortlessly elegant look—a crisp white button-down shirt, an unadorned shoulder bag, or a pair of lived-in trousers—are timeless,” Emma Childs writes for Marie Claire. Similarly, podcaster Avery Trufelman has pointed out that ‘quiet luxury’ is really just a rehashing of prep; not so different from the khakis, collared shirts, and tea dresses the Kennedys wore while on vacation in Hyannis Port.
And yet, the reason Carolyn Bessette still reigns as a muse, shaping the aesthetics of prep brands like Ralph Lauren, Carolina Herrerra, and Jil Sander, and reflecting the reduced looks of Khaite, The Row, and Phoebe Philo’s Céline is because of her own experience in the fashion industry, way before she became JFK Jr.’s cool, blonde wife. After being discovered in a Boston shopping mall by a top-ranking Calvin Klein executive, Carolyn went on to work at the brand’s New York store, rising to become a publicist. Carolyn’s taste was instrumental to the brand’s resurgence, which boosted sales by glorifying naked youth. Significantly, Carolyn favored the teenage Kate Moss as the face of the ad campaign that ushered in the heroin chic palette of the ‘90s. “Klein trusted Bessette’s taste; she was a muse, and he would eventually charge her with casting all his CK shows,” Maureen Callahan writes in Champagne Supernovas: Kate Moss, Marc Jacobs, Alexander McQueen, and the ‘90s Renegades Who Remade Fashion.
Carolyn’s look back then was grungier. She wore no makeup and styled her hair by flipping it up and down and putting it in a bun until it dried. “By the time we would get to the office, we’d take the bun down and our hair would just be ready to go,” Stormy Stokes, who worked in PR at Calvin Klein with Carolyn, recalls in CBK. “Let’s face it, neither of us could afford to have a blowout or dye our hair then, so with these tricks and our clothing allowance, we looked the part.”
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Calvin Klein’s influence appeared in Carolyn’s love for slip dresses. She wore them casually on their own or beneath a t-shirt. Most famously, she commissioned friend and designer Narciso Rodriguez for a simple bias-cut silk wedding gown, revolutionary in that time for its effortless elegance and minimalism. “We had these amazing polaroids we couldn’t publish, owned by Kelly Klein. They’re trying on slip dresses, either samples or on their way to being samples,” Kumar Nair says. “If it looked cool on them, then it was definitely worth reproducing design-wise. In that way, [Klein] used her as a gauge—like is this Calvin Klein? Because Carolyn was very much of that brand for a very long time.”
After Carolyn married JFK Jr., her look became more formal and lady-like, a visual streamlining of the minimalism she’d always favored. She went on to frequently wear the avant-garde Japanese designer Yohji Yamamoto, whose self-professed love for women shaped the clean lines of his clothes, and brands like Ann Demeulemeester and Prada. It’s photographs from this era which appear most often on social media, thanks to the almost-everyday documentation of the paps.
While influencers might not consciously copy Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy’s looks, the cinched blazer over pants, the straight silhouette of the midi skirt, the unadorned black dress, and cozy turtlenecks trending today all echo the timelessness of her style. It’s her no-stress simplicity which endures, the cleanness of her outfits balanced with an impulse towards comfort and control in equal parts. “When I stress about what to wear, I just stop and think about the simplicity of Carolyn,” the Instagram account carolyn_iconic posted alongside photos of Carolyn in a crisp white shirt and slightly faded blue jeans.
“I think there’s a huge sustainability side to this book,” Kumar Nair says. “Go and look in your wardrobe and see what you already have. Maybe save that one really amazing piece you love and treasure. You can be really seductive, beautiful, and charming with just wearing clean lines.”