‘Love Story’ sets off ‘JFK Jr. effect’ of quirky men’s fashion
The more obvious impact of Ryan Murphy’s “Love Story: John F. Kennedy Jr. and Carolyn Bessette” is the revival of CBK fever.
TikTok and Instagram – and, anecdotally, downtown Manhattan – are suddenly full of women in belted coats and thick tortoiseshell acetate headbands reminiscent of the ones worn by the late Carolyn Bessette Kennedy. The preppy D.C.-based womenswear brand Tuckernuck introduced a Carolyn Bessette Kennedy collection last November, and is touting it via social media once again this week thanks to “Love Story” mania. Selima Optique, the eyewear brand behind Bessette Kennedy’s signature skinny black sunglasses, is putting the original prototype pair on display at a trade show in New York next month. Even I have unearthed all my sleekest neutral-toned sweaters for the occasion, and I’m sure we’re all relearning together one of the cruelest rules of minimalism: whether your hyper-simple garments are chic or boring may depend on whether you yourself are especially alluring or not.
A secondary consequence of “Love Story,” though, and perhaps a slightly quieter one, is the renewed fascination with the wardrobe of Carolyn’s husband, John F. Kennedy Jr. The “JFK Jr. effect” has been documented across America. Young men are adopting John’s style for themselves. Young women are pushing it on their male partners. A trio of dudes in Kangol and newsboy hats recently popped up at a West Village bar. Guys in backward baseball caps and preppy khakis paired with wide ties are filming themselves on the streets of New York City.
What was notable about Carolyn’s clothes in real life was the restraint; the curation, the editing, what conspicuously wasn’t there. But John’s style incorporated more joyfully weird touches than his wife’s. While her style demonstrated consistency, his was all about a consistent willingness to try something, to take a step in a surprising direction. JFK Jr., in other words, was an exemplar of low-lift, everyday sartorial adventure.
In his 2019 biography of John, “America’s Reluctant Prince,” friend Steven M. Gillon memorably described John as “the most visible metrosexual of his time.” John regularly got facials, so as never to be troubled by the indignity of a zit. He worked out constantly to maintain his muscular silhouette. Gillon stops short of calling John vain, but he makes clear that his friend cared about how he looked and took pride in being considered handsome and stylish. John had been raised in elite society by a famously stylish East Coast family, but also lived in Greece, and as an adult, he sought out experiences that would expand his worldview, like the summer he spent in India after graduating from Brown University in 1983.
His wardrobe philosophy reflected all that. John could, as many observed back in the day, really wear a suit. But on more casual occasions, he liked to take familiar elements of menswear and either maneuver them into surprising shapes or combinations (see: his slacks hiked up into capri pants while he rode his bike around Manhattan; a bright yellow windbreaker paired with a bright blue and red hat) or add one weird accessory or twist that made each ensemble his own (a goofy, fringed fleece hat in the winter; a luxe wool scarf tossed over the shoulders of an otherwise sporty ensemble). The motorbike-style wallet chain that John wore with his business-casual looks, Gillon wrote, was soon emulated throughout the office of his politics magazine George. An off-duty look involving a waistcoat casually paired with a printed Oxford shirt and a wide, inexplicable fabric headband must be seen to be believed.
The FX series, to its credit, seems to know this well. Or, at least, to have learned it. An outcry ensued last year after the first promotional images surfaced: Fans of the Kennedys immediately called out that the suits on Paul Anthony Kelly’s John were too slim and that Carolyn’s hair – a complex mélange of buttery highlights in real life, a flat platinum blonde in early photos of actress Sarah Pidgeon – were wrong. The show promptly hired a new costume designer and started over.
“We all felt a responsibility and a sense of duty to, wherever we could, portray them – especially, for me, through the clothing – as accurately as possible,” says that costume director, Rudy Mance. “Part of the reason we all wanted to tell this story was to … extend their legacy.”
In this week’s installment, “Battery Park,” Kelly’s John wears no fewer than nine outfits across the episode’s 51 minutes. Several are painstakingly re-created from actual footage of well-documented occasions in the late 1990s. His double-breasted suit and ivory pocket square are meticulously re-created from footage of George’s launch, for instance, and the olive-colored overshirt, white tee, red striped shorts and backward fanny pack ensemble John wore the day of his infamous, paparazzi’d park fight with Carolyn.
Other looks, perhaps even more impressively, are entirely invented but nonetheless provide believable continuity where there are gaps in the public knowledge of John’s wardrobe. Kelly’s John bums around Hyannis Port in short shorts, understatedly glamorous D-frame sunglasses, a backward baseball cap and a pale blue, dappled pocket tee made of atypically heavy cotton. A scene where John and Carolyn sit together in a secluded bay in a boat finds John wearing the unusual but striking combination of a white dress shirt and bone-colored chinos.
Most of these imagined outfits, Mance explains, are based on or inspired by ensembles John was photographed wearing in his daily life, and many of the looks Kelly wears on-screen are authentic late-’90s pieces sourced from vintage shops and online resellers. But assembling a full John look often just meant sticking to a formula: familiar, upscale menswear silhouettes with one or two quirky, often sporty, idiosyncrasies.
“He would wear a beautiful, very classic, very structured Armani suit, but then he would throw on a pair of hiking boots and a backward baseball cap and then hop on his bike,” Mance says. “Like, he really was doing athleisure wear mixed with classic wear before anybody else.”
You could argue, as many do about Carolyn, that many of these outfits looked so good because the person wearing them was so conventionally attractive, so perfectly aligned to the commercial ideal of the time (and, frankly, now). Thin and blonde for her, tall and broad-shouldered with an ample head of lustrous hair for him.
But what we learn from these videos of the “JFK Jr. effect” as it takes hold of young men is that that’s not necessarily true – and more relevantly, not the point. You don’t have to look like John, in other words, to reap the benefits of dressing like him. The joy of wearing well-made staples with a touch of personal panache, the satisfaction of feeling grown-up and pulled-together – and still a little adventurous – is sometimes its own reward.
Notice, for instance, what happens every time content creator @girlwiththeslickback subjects her husband to another JFK Jr. makeover. After trading in his athleisure for Kennedy-style corduroys and braided belts, he stands a little taller. He even elicits a gasp from his wife with a stylish impromptu move: confidently flinging a sweater over his shoulder.
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