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Tag: Lauren Bessette

Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy – a style icon then and now

In the quarter-century since her passing on July 16, 1999, interest in Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy’s life and style has undergone a renaissance, on the internet and in two new books – Elizabeth Beller’s “Once Upon a Time: The Captivating Life of Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy” and Sunita Kumar Nair’s “CBK: Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy, A Life in Fashion.” “CBK” copyright Abrams. “Once Upon a Time” jacket design by Claire Sullivan and jacket photograph by Penske Media/Getty Images.

One of today’s most prominent fashion influencers has actually been gone from us 25 years. 

Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy, a Calvin Klein publicist; her husband, publisher John F. Kennedy Jr.; and her sister, Morgan Stanley executive Lauren Bessette, were just in their 30s when the plane he was piloting crashed off the coast of Martha’s Vineyard on July 16, 1999.

In the years since they slipped beneath the rolling darkness on that hazy July night, there have been annual remembrances and the occasional memoir, including the poignant “What Remains” (Scribner, 2005) by Carole Radziwill, Bessette-Kennedy’s close friend and the wife of JFK Jr.’s cousin and best friend, Anthony Radziwill.

But nothing compares to the explosion of interest in Bessette-Kennedy this year, with two new books – Elizabeth Beller’s laudatory “Once Upon a Time: The Captivating Life of Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy” (Gallery Books, $29.99, 329 pages) and Sunita Kumar Nair’s elegant, elegiac  “CBK: Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy, A Life in Fashion” (Abrams, $65, 255 pages). 

Meanwhile, on the internet, Bessette-Kennedy has been reborn as a quiet-luxury icon for the digital age. The classic minimalism of Calvin Klein and of her own style helped – white shirts, black pants, beige corduroys, a variety of LBDs (little black dresses). (Her simple, scoop-necked, sleeveless sheath of a wedding dress by designer-friend Narciso Rodriquez is captured in “CBK” by Denis Reggie’s famed photograph of the groom gallantly kissing the bride’s hand as they left the church but also in two sparkling pastel and white paintings by Mark Tennant.) 

The Bessette-Kennedy aesthetic was also part of a minimalist fashion strategy:  Buy few pieces but buy expensive. If you can’t have expensive, wear black. Choose other neutral colors as well – gray, navy and white. Favor texture over prints. Save pops of color for coats and Vineyard sarongs. Keep accessories, hair and makeup simple.

It was an approach to fashion that was not without its irony, and perhaps its disingenuousness, for Bessette-Kennedy honed “her uniform,” as Beller writes, so that she wouldn’t stand out in the glare of the detested paparazzi. Far from making her recede, however, it would brand her in the spotlight – then and now.

Bessette-Kennedy’s fashion sensibility would also crystallize the gulf between the way the press and public saw her and the way she apparently was. She was portrayed as an ice princess. But Beller describes the White Plains-born Bessette-Kennedy, who grew up in Greenwich, as a lively girl in an Italian-French Canadian family that had a strong work ethic. She went to Catholic school; liked people, particularly those who were vulnerable in some way; and always seemed to have a job. (One of the jokes was that while JFK Jr. and Anthony Radziwill were paling around on Aristotle Onassis’ Scorpios as teens, their future wives were working in Caldor’s discount department store – something JFK Jr. always marveled at.)

After St. Mary’s High School in Greenwich, Bessette-Kennedy studied education at Boston University but wound up working as a saleswoman at a Calvin Klein boutique in Beantown, where she was discovered, came to Calvin Klein in Manhattan – working with high-profile clients and rising to director of show productions – and met JFK Jr. “CBK” captures those heady, sunset days in images of the couple at events or strolling the streets of a pre-9/11 New York in what should’ve been theirs and the city’s happily ever after.

We know what happened. The world moved on to obsess over other luminaries. But an icon never dies. She just acquires a new meaning. So, too, Bessette-Kennedy, whose style has become an understated beacon for a new generation searching for a look to hold onto in uncertain times.

Tags:  Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy, John F. Kennedy Jr., Lauren Bessette, Calvin Klein, Morgan Stanley, Greenwich, White Plains, St. Mary’s High School, New York City, the 1990s, Denis Reggie, Narciso Rodriguez, Carole Radziwill, Anthony Radziwill, Caldor, “What Remains,” Elizabeth Beller, “Once Upon a Time: The Captivating Life of Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy,” Sunita Kumar Nair, “CBK: Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy, A Life in Fashion”

Still queen of style

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All eyes are on Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy as she stuns in this shimmering pink Oleg Cassini at a 1962 White House dinner with the French minister of culture, André Malraux (left) and her husband, President John F. Kennedy (right). Courtesy the White House.

Sheaths and shifts. Ropes of pearls. Pillbox hats atop a brunet bouffant. Large, dark glasses and and long, white gloves.

Such was the power of Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis’ wardrobe that the mere mention of a few articles of clothing or accessories is enough to conjure a woman who transformed American culture in part by transforming American fashion. Indeed, the book cover for Steven Rowley’s new novel, “The Editor,” features only the famed oversize sunglasses on a desk with the Manhattan skyline as a backdrop while the bubblegum pink cover of Eve Pollard’s novel “Jack’s Widow” depicts the bouffant hairdo, a strand of pearls and white gloves. The mind fills in the rest.

This is a big year for Jackie and her admirers. July 28 marks the 90th anniversary of her birth. (The 25th anniversary of her death was commemorated May 19.) This year is also the 20th anniversary of the death of her son, John F. Kennedy Jr., his wife, the former Greenwich resident Carolyn Bessette; and her sister, Lauren Bessette, in a plane crash off Martha’s Vineyard July 16.

“Age cannot wither her,” Shakespeare wrote of his Cleopatra, “nor custom stale her infinite variety.” The same could be said of Jackie, who continues to influence the influencers. Long before Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge wowed the Canadians with a red outfit that paid tribute to the scarlet of their flag and the Royal Mounties, Jackie donned a nubby red suit with a high collar, three-quarter sleeves and a matching pillbox hat for a 1961 visit that electrified Ottawa. The Jackie effect – the subject of a commemorative issue by People magazine – can be seen in Kate’s double-breasted coats and matching hats; her sister-in-law Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex’s white cape dress; first lady Melania Trump’s wide-belted outfits; Amal Clooney’s black T and white jeans; and Jennifer Lopez’s and Gwyneth Paltrow’s goddess gowns.

But few today remember that Jackie wasn’t always a style icon. A bookish equestrian whose introverted nature gave her a certain mystique as it shielded her from a prying public, a controlling mother, Janet Lee Auchincloss, and the Bouviers’ lack of wealth relative to her Auchincloss’ step-family, the coltish young Jackie was more apt to adapt the gamin look of a 1950s Audrey Hepburn than develop one of her own. It was her younger sister Lee, considered the more traditional beauty, who was the fashion and design trendsetter as well as a lover of the ancient Greeks (and one ancient Greek in particular, Aristotle Onassis) and the Italian Renaissance.

But if Lee was the more adventurous sister, Jackie had more stick-to-itiveness. With Oleg Cassini, the Paris-born couture and film costume designer, curating a wardrobe designed to read across the world stage, Kenneth devising a longer, bouffant hairdo to frame her wide-set bone structure and Halston creating pillbox hats that would just crown her large head, Jackie picked up the ball and ran with it. In both fashion and interior design, she indulged the love of France that was inspired both by her Bouvier blood and her junior year in Paris – “the happiest of my life,” she later recalled. It enabled her to mix French couture (Balenciaga, Dior, Givenchy) with domestic ensembles and to bring the White House into the present by looking to its refined Federal (early 19th century) past, which corresponded to the neoclassical period in France.

But interior design and fashion were always means to an end for Jackie, who saw them in service of creating a standard of excellence for the nation and an atmosphere of comfort for her husband, President John F. Kennedy, and their children, her number one priority.

With her children grown, she focused on historic preservation, championing Grand Central Terminal, and, as an editor encouraging a host of memoirists from Michael Jackson to Martha Graham.

Jackie remains the queen of style in part because she was always about so much more than that.