You’re missing the point.
The internet has rediscovered Carolyn Bessette Kennedy the way it rediscovers everything: through a slideshow.
Swipe. Black knit turtleneck. Swipe. Headband. Swipe. Straight-leg jeans. Swipe. Minimal gold jewelry. Swipe. Slim sunglasses.
There she is. Or at least, the version of her that fits neatly into a Pinterest board or a 15-second TikTok “How to Dress Like CBK” video.
With the release of Hulu’s Love Story, CBK has re-entered the cultural bloodstream. And just as the internet tends to do, it has reduced her to a moodboard. A capsule wardrobe. A shopping list. A colour palette. Apparently, all it takes to embody one of the most scrutinised women of the 90s is the correct shade of camel. This is, of course, missing the point entirely.
Carolyn did not live in minimalist serenity. She lived under microscopic attention. In the orbit of one of the most famous political families in America, every gesture risked interpretation. She was photographed relentlessly outside her apartment. Followed through airports. Down sidewalks. Into moments that were never meant to be public. Her marriage was tabloid currency. Her expressions dissected for evidence of happiness or tension. Analysed for the way she wore her hair, the way she walked, and the way she did or did not smile. Now decades later, we have decided that what made her so remarkable was her headband.
She was not compelling because she wore black sweaters. Black sweaters are widely available. She was compelling because she was self-posessed. Because she built a career in fashion at Calvin Klein before she ever became a Kennedy. Because she guarded her privacy with a discipline that now feels almost radical. Because she was not dazzled by proximity to power – she retained her own. And that, unfortunately, cannot be purchased.
Once again, we have replicated the aesthetic and ignored the ethic. The irony is almost cruel. The woman who resisted spectacle has now become content. The woman who avoided performance is now an aesthetic performance. The woman who chose privacy has now been flattened into an algorithm. What would Carolyn say if she saw all this today?
It is much easier to buy a headband than to cultivate boundaries. It is much easier to mimic composure than to build it. This is the cultural reflex now. Find a woman with complexity. Extract her outline. Sand down all of the inconvenient parts – the ambition, the contradictions, the privacy – and turn all of what remains into a lookbook. How efficient. How deeply uncurious.
What made Carolyn Bessette Kennedy so magnetic wasn’t her minimalism. It was her sense of restraint. Our culture is increasingly obsessed with visibility; documenting, sharing, announcing, curating… But Carolyn chose opacity. She spoke little. She revealed less. She understood something that we seem to have collectively forgotten: not everything has to be shown to exist.
When every woman in the room is wearing the same black turtleneck in the name of individuality, something has gone wrong. We call it “timeless”, which is really just a generous way of saying socially approved. Trend culture sells us a fantasy of distinction but delivers uniformity. We are told to find our personal style, as if identity were a downloadable preset. But if everyone downloads the same one, what exactly are we expressing? Are you cultivating taste, or just fluency in trends?
Cosplay is not inspiration. To be inspired by Carolyn would not mean replicating her silhouette. It would mean asking the uncomfortable questions. What would it look like to protect my privacy more fiercely? To value independence before romance? To remain intact in love? To speak less, but mean more? To tolerate being misunderstood? Truthfully, the most Carolyn Bessette Kennedy “thing” a woman could do now would not be buying another minimalist knit. It would be to decide who you are without asking the algorithm first.
It is not spoken nearly enough about how damaging the way we reduce powerful women to outfits is. The moment a woman becomes a look, she becomes manageable. It makes her easier to consume, to replicate, to flatten. Complexity becomes an inconvenience. And we don’t want inconvenience, do we?
We have a habit of turning women into archetypes once they can no longer contradict us. But Carolyn was not a headband. She was not a uniform. She was a woman who understood that real presence does not require performance. It is all too familiar to fall victim to the illusion that if you get the outline right, you’ll inherit the substance. That if you dress like her, you might absorb her composure. It feels attainable. It definitely feels easier than doing the slower, less photogenic work of building self-assurance from scratch. An outfit can be ordered by tomorrow afternoon. Confronting yourself takes years.
So if you’re going to be inspired by her, go deeper. Leave the turtleneck behind. Keep the standards. Because style can be copied, but selfhood cannot.
By Ashley Wee
