“Classic” is a category that’s given a lot of air time in fashion coverage, often viewed as a way of dressing that’s morally superior to the frivolity of trends. Much of the time, the term is associated with specific clothes or accessories — a trench coat or a Birkin bag — that are thought to be resistant to the ebbs and flows of the industry.
Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy, the fashion publicist who married John F Kennedy Jr in 1996 and died aged 33 in a plane crash in 1999, is often categorised as such, with her minimalist aesthetic tapping into a certain timelessness. As a new book on the New Yorker illustrates, she had a wholly individual sense of style, and eye for design that seemed effortless but was in fact carefully considered and rehearsed.
“It was Carolyn who singularly translated conceptual runway fashion with her American fashion language of simplicity and accessibility,” writes Sunita Kumar Nair in Carolyn Bessette Kennedy: A Life in Fashion, which is out this month. “She applied her polished discerning eye to every piece she wore.”
Bessette-Kennedy was, in many ways, America’s answer to Princess Diana: a young woman reluctantly thrust into the spotlight through marriage. She was born in White Plains, New York, to an engineer father and a school administrator mother, and studied education at Boston University. She worked as a sales associate at a Calvin Klein store in Boston, which was where she was “discovered” by Susan Sokol, Calvin Klein’s president of women’s wear. In the book Klein himself describes her as “beautiful but self-deprecating”, noting that she had a “great sense of style and stood out from the rest”. Bessette-Kennedy was given a job in celebrity sales, where she made wealthy clients part with their cash, and also slotted into New York’s social scene at the time.
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