I’m Into These Heinous Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy Promo Images
I’m surprised no one has unearthed CBK’s preferred brand of toilet paper.
I’m not mad at the Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy and JFK Jr. promotional images for Ryan Murphy’s mini-series American Love Story. The photos are hilariously heinous. This is CBK drag. That camel coat looks like a brick. The actress has no movement in her hair. They flatironed those tresses to death and put those ends through a paper cutter. The wind would blow, and that blowout wouldn’t budge. Hey, the woman got primped and primed for a studio shot.
Bessette-Kennedy is considered a fashion icon whose entire quiet look is based on quality and fit, so it feels bizarre for that part of her life to be neglected in the mini-series. But we’ve seen these CBK images before, more or less. We’ve been perverting Bessette-Kennedy for eons. We’ve commodified a dead woman’s essence, endlessly attempting to extract her soul from moodboards that shill cashmere turtlenecks, sunglasses, and hairbrushes. The same goes for Jane Birkin. Imagine your whole existence distilled into a moodboard. Oy!
How could the American Love Story images not be demented? This is a drama pumped with kitsch. This isn’t an erotic thriller set in New York in 1999. This isn’t a film. This isn’t cinema. There’s no Adrian Lyne manning the lens, holed up on a Soho street, screaming about a wind machine. It’s television!
Ultimately, good clothes don’t exist in most movies anymore. (And did they ever in tv?!) Film buff
of Mise-En-Scène sent me a DM of text from the magazine A Rabbit’s Foot. It was a still of a quote from stylist Olivia Pezzante talking about American Gigolo (1980): “I have what I call ‘outfit memory.’ I can recall any outfit worn by my close friends on any day. But ask me to name a single iconic look from a recent film…and I draw a blank. Has the styling budget gone missing, or has the styling itself forgotten to make us care?”It’s never about budget. The best films never had a budget1. I go back a lot to costume designer Ellen Mirojnick, who styled Unfaithful (2001) and A Perfect Murder (1998). She took Gwyneth Paltrow shopping for her role as Emily Bradford Taylor in A Perfect Murder. When I spoke to her about Unfaithful, Mirojnick also told me that she got many of the pieces custom-made to fit Diane Lane’s body. Even the way Mirojnick creates her design boards, there’s imagery dripping with something: a crumpled dress, a leg tangled up in the sheets. You’re not going to get that sweltering fashion oomph in a Murphy mini-series. No one cares how a shirt rides the curve of the waist or just how low the neckline dips when a woman leans over the counter for her coffee. This universe barely exists anymore, so neither does the styling. We’re dressing for a curated, very chronicled, and online world.
I don’t think people want to clone Bessette-Kennedy and morph into her by way of Pinterest (they can’t), but the woman, who has long passed, has become too dissected. Part of her appeal is that there wasn’t so much exposure. Part of anyone’s appeal is that there is some secrecy. There’s some of that gnaw-on-it mystery. The woman gatekept herself. You can’t put that sort of fantasy in a moodboard, but at this point, I’m surprised there isn’t an affiliate link for the brand of toilet paper CBK used. On that note, I can’t wait to watch this mini-series.
Kissing Jessica Stein (2001) barely had a costume budget, and those were some of the best looks I’ve ever seen!!!! Read here.
there’s also something dark here about the yassificion / internetifiction of CBK. this interpretation of her looks like a scary doll, as do many women in 2025… somehow commentary on the little room we leave for natural beauty these days
You can literally find pieces she'd wear on The RealReal or close enough and lived in eBay or ThredUp this is literally like Temu version.